Tasting Vertigo
by HospitallerInaBoat
Summary: What do you do when the giant snake with fun-bags wants the D? AU (M!Human x F!Vertigo)
1. Chapter 1

_**So I've been caught on the fence as to whether or not to label this with my infamous OLDER WORK tab, mainly because it's written really Shakespearean (and I can't stand Shakespeare) and it moves way too slow for me, but I suppose the smex was good**_

_**Heavy violence/gore/dismemberment, foul language and interspecies dirtiez as usual**_

_**Support my on FurAffinity, Deviantart, Wattpad and P treon for more stuff**_

* * *

**Tasting Vertigo**

**1**

* * *

**_"Have you ever fornicated with such ravage that you got a little dizzy afterwards?"_**

* * *

She started taking an interest in him immediately after he touched the Madness Stone, and he wasn't driven to insanity by its otherworldly powers. His resoluteness in the face of impossibilities- she admitted –_intrigued_ her profusely, and this final action was nothing but fervent proof of his unusual ways.

This touched at her brain with copious fillings of burning curiosity, and a displacement of what had effectively been a boring century. You see, the earth had cracked and molten magma had consumed the trees and the green all around her. She was a being entertained by the torment and viscosity of life, and ever since the Cataclysm there hadn't been a whole lot of that to go around.

It seemed as if everything had spiraled from her grasp and toppled out of her own reach before that. Like the world had shattered into fragmented shards that refused to be pieced back together. With its death, had it taken her resolve, and most of all her _passion._

She _was_ a creature of that too. _Passion._ She was impassioned by the proverbial prods with the stick of madness. She was impassioned by the articulations of how to break a mind. She was impassioned by all things unusual and _unforeseen._

Thus, when the little primate performed his little miracles, with his little hands, her shriveled and marvel-starved brain could do nothing to rebuke the oncoming fixation.

After all, it was quite a spectacle.

He'd _touched_ Madness Stone. He'd touched it, and he still possessed that eccentric little mind of his.

Oh, how she pondered the relevance and possibility of it. She pondered, and pondered and pondered! But she never found an answer, or a distraction worth pursuing beyond the realm of a stagnant hunch.

How had he done it? What was he made of beneath that mortal flesh and that mortal bone? Was there some kind of magic that he performed? One that she couldn't smell? She was the sorceress queen of the Gallows! She _was_ magic. He was puny, and pathetic, and _expendable._ He could hide nothing from her.

But still, the answer to all those questions?

Vertigo couldn't decipher a clue as to their whereabouts. She just didn't _know. _She was utterly lost in this mish-mashing soup of collusion and respite. Somehow, deep down inside, she knew she was lowering herself to a level of desperation simply by considering it, and yet there was a stronger muscle within her physique that rendered it impossible for her to care.

Her pride and her might were but lumbering titans in the face of things truly complex. It was much easier to bore her hatred for this planet through the art of wanton intimidation and murder. But those things were only temporary and up-front solutions to problems more often than not complex and multilayered. She could only kill what was worth killing, and she could only intimidate what was weak minded and futilely willed.

_He_ was none of those things.

_He_ was a curiosity, and Vertigo didn't feel so compelled to quell her breast simply by killing him, or driving him mad, or even sending him away.

-Though she knew all of those fates were in her claws, so to speak. She could snap her talons and offer him to hell on a whim. With but a dismissive flick of her tail; his eccentricities, and all his guile and curious nature would be gone, and finite, and finished eternally.

But Vertigo just… didn't want to handle it like that.

She wondered why. She was a creature of weird power, and she _was_ mighty, and prideful. She was fast, strong, _big_ and durable. She was even _smart._ She was all these things, and yet, she'd never taken herself as someone so open to the corruptive touch of vulnerability.

Was it really that she was just bored out of her scales? Granted, the evenings had been duller and duller by the year. It seemed her past pleasant memories of days filled with the destruction of angry foes, and the enslavement of bleating cattle-folk were gradually being erased by embarrassing flicks of empty afternoons, and hours spent counting the thorns running down her sinuous tail's spine.

So it must have been the boredom. If nothing else, to stave off the general dissolution and evaporation of her deified image on the wind. She was just a curious, cruel soul. But never before had that cruelty extended to _self torture._ And indeed, Vertigo was torturing herself by letting that little, walking, pink-skinned man grovel at her feet like the animal he was.

_Is it his flesh or his mind?_

She was honestly confused about that too. It all was just a byproduct of what she embodied.

Madness? Insanity? The destruction of cranial integrity? It begged the question as following; did her rivals in the neighboring lands suffer the same self-inflicted sufferings?

Perhaps Diablo suffered a flaming asshole whenever he ate too many of his own followers. Maybe Chaos was engulfed in periods of general bad luck when he thought of his own name on a dime's flip.

She could go on. She preferred not to, but she could have.

-The point being entirely; was it feasible to toil under something you were meant to inflict on others? Was it just deserts?

Maybe she _deserved_ to be driven mad after all the strife and toil she'd caused on Urth.

If she kept that little man around any longer, than she might as well have simply sentenced herself to that doomed fate. Because he was driving her freaking crazy.

_Flesh or mind? _She nagged herself as the present returned to her. _It's different that I ask, because he looks delectable to me all of a sudden. I don't mean in the ways of nourishment. Well, nourishment in a… a sense._

The serpentine reptilioid found herself caught in a moment of embarrassed punctuation. Her snout fervently erupted into a bright shade of pink, and her sinuous tail flexed with a regal twist to grind itself between her thighs.

_What is wrong me?_

A noise in front of her caught her attention, and dragged her from the storm of mediocrity and cheesy chaos that had sluggishly flooded her skull.

_Flesh or mind?_

Vertigo was organically geared towards the disposition and organization of a serpent almost as much as she was a dinosoid. Her lithe, powerful neck supported her perpendicular and angular head with a sweeping grace's touch. It allowed her to constantly maintain height over her source of troubled intrigue. Thus, being several heads taller than him, she had to look down and peer between her knees to fully understand what it was he wanted.

A fine specimen of a human man stood there, caught in the crimson, blooded gaze of the always-dreary sky that spiraled like a flight of vultures over her realm. The Gallows were but a ring of gray teeth surrounding the two of them in eternal silence. The wrecked stone of the Old Earth did little to assuage her mental state or ward away his attentions, much to her chagrin/delight.

He was too thin for how much she let him eat. She had never allowed her cult such freedom before the more recent conflicts had wiped them all out. She wondered what decency had been born in her heart to make her go against her own nature in such a way.

Maybe it was just his neutrality. She asked him to do all kinds of menial tasks around here and he simply did them. He never said a word, and he rarely offered her expressions.

He'd always just do what he was doing now.

He'd grunt.

_What now? _–It meant.

So he grunted, and stood at the foot of the ziggurat throne she lounged atop patiently, and expectantly.

_Look at you, you little monkey._

Vertigo was low on energy today. She didn't have much of an adventurous spirit about her as she did a solemn surrendering to sleepiness and idle demands. She'd basically had him doing pointless things just to keep him away from her while she stewed in self respite and an entire cavalcade's worth of disorganized, depression-wallowed shit.

She managed to quirk an eye ridge at him at least, and with enigmatic curiosity, did she lift her crimson eyes from his stalwart and plain face to the task she'd most recently sent him off too.

Organized cleanly in a neat, stacked rise just ahead of her throne was a pile of masonry bricks. Their gray, blocky masses were all set and precisely placed. The tower, or shrine, or _hill_, or whatever you called it, was made with a creative child's care in the handling of a toyset of building blocks.

The little human man had probably spent the latter half of an hour idly constructing that pathetic idol in her image. All of it was ordered without words. She had merely brushed her taloned fingers through the air and sent him off to entertain himself.

Lest he grew too detached (which she knew would never happen) –his lack of originality hadn't taken him far. As each and every time she brushed him away, he'd simply nod, or shrug, and play with the rocks. Or, he'd _build_ with them. He was too old to say he played with them. How old? She didn't really know that either. All she knew was that he suppressed an intellect that she secretly, and coldly admired, and that he wasn't ass-end dumb like the majority of his race left to fester on this planet.

_Twenty some odd years. Thirty some odd years. I don't care._

A displeased hiss rattled out between her fangs and died like a cold wind's dissipation on the air. The serpent goddess' tail flicked with an edge of agitation, and she offered a reptilian sigh as she scooted and adjusted herself on the moss-ridden rock of her makeshift throne.

_Let's mix things up a bit, man-thing._

She had always just nodded to him to reconstruct it into a new shape each time he completed the task. This time, her tail promptly unlatched from around her ankles, slipped with the agility of a darting leech around and past his flank, where its tip was brought to bear.

Vertigo leant her chin into her knuckles, and watched the expressionless human with a taste of genuine wonder at what his reaction would be.

Without delay, the serpent gave her tail a tiny _kick! _–and the stone pile he had spent all that time stacking collapsed under her effortless, inhuman strength.

**_Crash!_** –it went, and dust flew everywhere as every meticulously stacked brick when tumbling to the dead earth.

The human sluggishly turned to process her calamity, but in the end did he not erupt in rage or quiver with stifled mourning. The man eyed the smoke wavering over the debris, grunted, and turned back to her, bowing slightly even as he did it.

_If it pleases you,_ she could practically hear him say.

_If it pleases me? If it pleases me! As if nothing _else_ can please me on this god-forsaken rock I've been damned to. Locked here with _you,_ and your supple skin, and your curious invulnerability to every touch of my power I try to use on you._

Vertigo flexed her blood-red eyes at him even now, trying to touch his mind with her mastery of madness and sorcerous corruption.

She could feel his apish, lesser mind. She could massage it with her mental claws, and consider the feeling of its wet death as it would run down her knuckles, liquefying whilst she squeezed and popped it like a troublesome zit.

But he was immune to these things. He'd touched _Madness Stone;_ the material native to her reality where her old palace lie in ruins. He'd come with her to there, and he had touched the things _neverthere!_

If he could withstand _that,_ than her powers were nothing but childish swats with a babe's hand at an immovable mass.

It wasn't even worth risking the aneurism over. He was mentally untouchable and she still couldn't figure out why.

_As if I want to know,_ the serpent's fangs were revealed as she sneered down at him. She adjusted on her crumbling throne again, and nonchalantly dismissed him with her fingers, brushing him away, as she always did when his meaningless tasks were complete. _Go back to your rocks, plaything._

The human glanced between her, the fallen bricks, and without so much as a secondary falter; _grunted,_ and turned around to rebuild what she'd destroyed.

It was too easy. He could not be corrupted, and yet he was entirely at her whim.

What a wholly dissatisfying _satisfactory_ experience. She felt like she was taking half-a-shit in that moment.

_Don't forget to bow to your queen,_ her narrowed eyelids portrayed the daring demand for her. The man bowed slightly, and grunted again.

_Make it a different shape this time too, _she rolled her wrist.

Another grunt from him.

_And make it bigger; find more stones lying around,_ she swept her finger to the north, west and east.

He grunted once more.

_And bring me meat. I hunger, _she brushed a slender thumb down one of her fangs as she opened her mouth, her tongue daggering in the air once to taste its scents.

He responded as usual. Another grunt.

_And fuck yourself, while you're at it._ She didn't need a gesture or movement for that. That bit was for herself because she was so bored.

Nevertheless, indefatigably, did he persevere. He always persevered. Vertigo didn't bother asking herself what the Gallows would be like if he didn't.

For some reason, the idea of isolation bothered her, for whatever it was worth.

* * *

-0-0-0-0-0-


	2. Chapter 2

**Tasting Vertigo**

**2**

* * *

Compsognathus always tasted sweet to her. Their haunches were delectable morsels to her palette, especially when her little human slave cooked them for her in his usual unrepentant manner.

_Another,_ she nodded shortly before swallowing the mouthful caught in her fangs. Her snake tongue lapped at the cleaned bone for just a clinging moment longer, before she balanced it on her palm, and tossed it unceremoniously over her lithe shoulder.

**_Bnk~! _**–went the bone as it rebounded off one of the Gallows' many ruined wall and cathedral plots. It joined three others of its kind, all cleaned to the white core. Vertigo curled with a feline's roundness on the dead earth and gorged herself simply because she could and because she was greedy by nature. The man had come back with a small pile of corpses to work with, and thus the supply wasn't running out any time soon.

Besides, the process of watching the butchering technique heightened her appetite. Vertigo needed the calories to burn away on her hours of loathing the world and wishing death on foes who had long moved on and forgotten her.

_Flesh or mind? _The serpent asked herself again. She watched as the shorter human bowed and stepped back from watching her eat. He trotted over to a bloody flatstone, where the mangled remains of a Compsognathus dinosaur were cut up and arrayed neatly in his usual style. There was another fat haunch leaking crimson on the slab. He gripped the gray-scaled leg and slid it off with a tiny grunt of effort. He ran a spear through it close to the bone, and she reveled in the crunching of destroyed flesh.

The flames in the little fire he'd built crackled as they went to work on roasting the meat. He propped the spear against the stone basing of the pile and waited in silent patience, his pink back to her as he worked.

The fire danced like some sort of illuminating chorus that highlighted the human to her fully. As she regressed into what she viewed as a taboo weakness yet again, the serpent allowed a whimsical breath to slip through her fangs.

Vertigo rolled her hips so that she was lying on her side, the fire bounding as a copper tint off her navy blue and green striped body. Affirming a comfortable position; she started what had become a sort of routine to her.

The human was the only follower she had left, and was by extension the only other living thing out here with her in the Gallows beside the animals she always used as a food source. Her curiosity had morphed continually over the months and subsequent years, and she now knew through the experience of hours of observation where to look and when to do so to experience the height of satisfactory visual stimulation.

To her, it was an art. Anyone else could've stared at the little man all day and not recognized the significance in his stature, or the delicious roll in his thigh muscles. He was only wearing a rag over his hips; so there wasn't much she was missing, and like a fine connoisseur, could she pompously esteem herself as a master of something quite quaint, and awkward by dinosoid standards.

_An understanding of apish anatomy, something I now possess,_ she sighed again, perching her elbow on the ground. She regally supported her narrow chin and gazed with tired eyes at his backside. _He'd take it off if I ordered him to do it._

Vertigo's nostrils flared in a derogatory snort. The insult was aimed at _her_, conversely, and not him.

_You stare at an animal? _

_He is alien. He is… mature._

Still, he grunted and earned her attention. The serpent's ruby eyes snapped upwards and locked with his white and smaller ones. His normally expressionless demeanor had been replaced by something she was not used to seeing from him.

He appeared _curious._

_What are you staring at? _His look asked her without actually asking her.

Vertigo was anathema to being put in a submissive social stance. Thus, the cool touch of what she knew was a developing heat across her snout positively tapped her displeasure.

_Cook,_ she nodded to over his shoulder at the fire. _Or I'll eat _you_ instead._

The human grunted and turned back to his charge without pursuing the matter further. Though she knew this was purely because of his disinterest. Her tactics of intimidation were paltry to his eyes. He was a confident one, using that brain of his. He knew with as much certainty as that fire was cooking her food, that she would never do away with him.

_And stay down,_ Vertigo huffed anyway, squinting at the back of his head accusingly. _Where was I?_

As he rotated the haunch on its spear to start heating up the other side, she felt herself developing a spiteful glare to replace her eager expression. Beforehand, she had the eyes of a starving predator taking a choice pick out of a gallery of fine meats and steaks. The description wasn't off from its own merit; she _was_ starving, and again, it was not in a sense of nourishment.

_But nourishment in its own way! _Vertigo defended, bundling up the confliction and sighing again. It earned another sideways glance from the man, but she did not pay him heed this time.

At least, she didn't pay his _face_ any heed.

_What is it about his flesh, for instance? Why do I watch it with a predatoress' hunger, and yet I do not wish to sink my teeth into it?_

Thousands of hours spent hunting, preparing her food, fixing her throne and performing menial tasks had rendered her human slave immune to the midday heat of ruined Urth. Though he was slender, he was not untouched by the sculpting hands of masculinity. There were quaint, and approachable muscles that twisted, rippled and flexed like minute strands of chrome beneath his pinkish skin. Vertigo's eyes bounced and rolled with their motions in an almost glued-on sort of compromise with gravity.

_His body is so… glistened. It rolls, and his diminutive stature is interestingly incommensurable to my own._

Something itching her around her tummy caused the serpent's leg to kick in a momentary lapse of reflexive motion. Vertigo banished any suspicion by rolling onto her other hip, and her chops smacked to wipe away a slight trailing of saliva that she had lost control of.

_What are you playing at? _She asked herself sourly.

Such displays of sheepish fascination! What did she fancy herself as? Some stricken maiden of a lesser race and lesser culture? _Swooning?_

_I do _not_ swoon._

_Oh, but you do._

-Was it also inevitable that she would suffer her own madness in the sense of conversing with herself? Contrary to how her craft might have spun it as; there was no one else in her brain except her. It was only Vertigo, Vertigo, _Vertigo. _No others! None.

Her brain and her mind were hers, the Gallows were hers, and both of those things were becoming wrinkled, disinteresting and unnecessarily laborious for her.

In fact, Vertigo was beginning to hate how she lived. It was a strong word to utilize, but it was accurate. _Hatred._ Hatred was a blood red thing, kind of like her eyes, and it embodied how she was still galled all these years later at her eventual defeat and how she had been reduced to a queen of ruin.

She had once sported a mighty cult! Her Madness Temple had finished construction in the neverthere, and she had beaten the other dinosoid and human lords around her domain with ease!

She had been a _champion._ She was the mightiest sorceress to have ever lived! Mind-bending powers and spirit-destroying hexes were at her command…

-And then the wars had happened and stolen all that from her.

Was it truly such an offense to enslave and mind wipe her _willing_ servants? They had all knelt at her clawed feet and offered themselves to the touch of insanity! Did it really matter that their lack of education, and their close-mindedness were ample buffers keeping them from the pleasures of independent thought?

The reasoning of the rest of this world was baffling to her.

It was a kill or be killed planet, Urth. Since the Cataclysm, it had always been that way. Some folks even said that it was like that _before_ the End had come.

She was merely playing on her own nature. Vertigo was just doing what she was designed to do. Enslave, conquer, _expand._ She was meant to destroy the weak and enthrall the strong. It was the way of things.

Apparently, the world and even fate itself had disagreed. It was the only explanation for her defeat, and why she was doomed to stew in her ruined hell-kingdom with this lowly, sweat-glistened, muscular and delectably under-sized little-

-Vertigo actually managed to startle herself with that tumbling, snowballing rant. Her resultant gasp gripped the concern of her subject of torment.

"_Hmm?_" -Came the inevitable grunt from his throat.

The human turned from his cooking endeavors, his back highlighted a hellish amber that shadowed his concerned face.

Vertigo was caught in an oxygen strangling second of confusion, and thus she wasn't able to instantly ward him off as she normally did.

Recognizing a conflicted expression from her, the man had hurried over either out of diamond-sharp concern or genuine confusion as to her uncharacteristic spin of behavior. His hands were by his hips, opened, and upturned; ready for whatever task his serpentine other demanded of him.

For her part, Vertigo's nostrils were suddenly touched by his sweat-stink. It was an amalgamation of odors and salty undertones that she was horrified in her own garnered pleasure from tasting.

He normally didn't come this close. She supposed his affectionate proximity was made a bit manic, and that was her fault. After all, she'd been acting weird for days as these corrupting thoughts had been brewing in her stomach like a reservoir of heavy lead.

For just a second of her considerations was she made to look up at him from her feline curl on the ground. Though she was three heads taller than him and much bigger, given her current bodily sprawl, he actually towered over her for once.

There stood the little ape, glaring at her with these wide, platter eyes that sported a glistening measure of worry. He was unafraid of her, not intimidated, and he stood at hair's length from her with but a single thing present on his little mind:

_Worry?_

-Worrying was a sign of attachment. Attachment was a sign of affection. Affection came from the _heart._ Vertigo despised the hearts of people.

Her impatience reached a boiling point. The serpentine dinosoid reared back her sinuous neck, and she _screeched_ at him with her fullest volume. The sound was as inhuman as it was supernaturally predefined. Its reptilian rattle shed with a snake's hiss, and the outcry of a shrieking woman. Her long tongue flapped at him like a trailing streamer, and hot, steaming spittle cast past her fangs and slapped wetly on the ground at his feet.

_Cook! _-Her crimson eyes barked. She used her front claws to grapple the earth, digging great rends into the soil and dead grass. She hoisted her shoulder line upwards and her belly from the ground. On her knees, the monstrous goddess heaped her frustrations loudly and continually, until her roar terminated, and her slave was left standing before her ostensibly, and noticeably confused.

_He is not even shaken! He does not quiver at my presentation! _-Vertigo reeled, her hateful look melting away for an expression of wanton horror.

The human was just standing there, engrossed as ever, with uneven brows, _menacing _her with an air of curiosity and innocence.

_I don't understand,_ he silently told her, merely offering the mighty reptile a _shrug._ Just a shrug! This was outrageous!

_Damn him to hell!_

Vertigo deemed she was now empowered to direct him with the tenacity meant for a disobedient infant. The dinosoid's chops quivered in rage. She smashed a fist into the ground, rumbling the sinews of the earth.

_Finish cooking my meal, or I'll rend you limb from limb! _-She mentally screamed, jabbing a finger at the fire, and the half-cooked Compsognathus haunch. _Do not approach me again! Feed me, and leave me be, welp!_

She finally expected his resolve to falter, after all these years of his needless pampering of her, and his living in her larger shadow; she believed triumph had finally met her deluded quest. She believed she had finally, _finally _frightened him at least.

But no. That is not what occurred.

"_Mm._" The man grunted in the twilight of her enraged spat. Like a lone statue standing among a cleared field of total ruin, he was an idol that bracketed where all else toppled and fell. He bowed politely, turned on a heel, and went back to the fire. His stride betrayed the essence of this exchange not even occurring.

The mighty serpentine female watched his back with childish defiance, like a daughter would scold the departing presence of her lecturing father after a good, stern talking-to. She felt her soul wither a tad from this perceived weakness.

She was the mighty dinosoid goddess of insanity! She could not be defeated, and stooped by this- this-

_This rodent!_

-Vertigo's jaw lowered as she contemplated killing him. His innocent audacity was becoming too much to bear any longer, and for the first time was she seriously questioning herself about this proverbial blood-letting.

She tried to view his muscles in a sense of literal taste. He was a ripe morsel. His blood would sustain her for days. She could swallow him whole, or chew him, and the end result would be delicious in either respect.

He was completely at her mercy now, with his back turned, with his attention preoccupied. She could do it. She'd stamped out rebellion in her cult, she was no stranger to killing her foes, and killing them _brutally_ at that.

But again, her own eyes betrayed her and stabbed her in the back. They _lingered_ where she did not want them too.

They stuck on the side of his face, and they absorbed for her his expression of innocence. To him, he was merely trying to please her. He was trying to fulfill simply and with execution her wishes because that was what he lived to do.

It was a beautiful thing, seeing such a complex and intelligent person that she knew he was, dimmed to such simplicities.

His face subdued her murderous intents, and the longer she looked at him, the more his skin destroyed it entirely.

_Flesh,_ she realized, her face loosening from its grip of hate as she watched his muscle fibers moving under his hide. His hands were deft as he toyed with the spear and the fire he had created for her servitude. _And mind._

She traced the curve of his back, tinted in a glistening touch from his efforts of heaving the fat meat haunch around the fire to cook it. She followed the sweeping muscles making his hips into the balled joints of his thighs.

_He is delectable! _She wailed internally, negative emotion strangling her chest. _By all that is twisted by the neverthere; what is _wrong _with me?!_

Vertigo snapped her crimson eyes shut, clenched her fangs and _huffed_ through them. Nothing she did could burn out the images of his copper limbs and the innuendos she cryptically deciphered from their antagonizing presentations.

Alas; as she suffered, her servant was as oblivious to her torment as he was ominous to her behavior. He had just been turning around with the spear holding her meal. The man's plain face now supported a raised brow, and he had to arch his back slightly to look up and meet her at an eye-to-eye level.

Vertigo pinched open one of her sights at his stirring, and then gasped in exasperation when she realized what she had been doing.

She was on her claws and knees, and she was effectively looming over him by a head. The frightening part was? Well, she hadn't moved so closely when she was thinking about _eating him._ She had moved closer when she had started thinking about-

_Give._

Vertigo's taloned fingers snatched the impaled hunk of meat from his hands disparagingly. She sat back on her rump with a heavy _thud!_ –and curled her long, thick tail around her raptornoid ankles.

Trying to force him from her concentration, the deified reptile attempted to shove as much of the haunch into her long mouth as was physically possible. Her jaw unhinged, and the supple flesh crunched and squelched as she dragged her fangs through it in the form of twin destructive trenches.

Some of the juices fell down her mandible and dripped hotly on her armored clavicle, and on her scaly breasts. They fled downwards wherever they made contact, still dripping, creating greasy trails.

The serpent ripped from the haunch roughly and half-chewed the bounty she'd taken, closing her eyes, and allowing herself to stew in the taste of the juices.

_I can find my happy-place here. Happy place. Happy-_

Vertigo's mighty chest bucked as she swallowed her mouthful wrong. Gobbets of ruined, cooked meat were cast like hail as she swept the haunch drumstick from her sight, and glanced down with shock at her scaly tummy.

Standing like a perched and proud little bird between her knees was her unspoken, indentured servant. The man was holding a flat _leaf frond_ in his hand, and was fervently dabbing at some of the drippings that had trailed down her sinuous, shapely belly. He viewed it as an effort to make peace with her. She in turn, could process it as nothing less than a continued degradation of the situation.

He glanced up at her shocked expression once, _smiled,_ and then continued dabbing away at the mess.

Vertigo sat there with her cheeks puffed from the mass of her meal's latest bite. She felt compelled to suddenly throw up.

_Get away from me! _-She practically cried, announcing her continued displeasure in the form of a serpentine shriek. No longer could she sport such a look of anger. _Now_ Vertigo looked pleading, and genuinely afraid.

The powerful dinosoid could have stepped on him! She could've crushed him, and obliterated him and royally fucking smashed him into the earth! She could've reduced him to a bloody stain. _Less than that._ There could be nothing left! She could erase him, remove him, expunge him from the world and she could've done it on a whim.

But she _just. could. not. actually. do. it._

Flustered, the reptile's chops parted in a slight mewl. She pressed her plush heel into his chest and nudged him back roughly with her foot. Indicative of her stature; her foot was easily the size of his forearm. It contained enough force to suck a gasp from him as he fell onto his backside just ahead of her.

He resembled a dumb gorilla on the ground, head raised like that of a piqued meerkat's, eyes wide, mouth sealed in an unreadable line of meek curiosity.

She brought her haunch around, and let it drip all over herself as she hugged it, seeking the comfort of perhaps a child's teddy bear or a trusted stuffed animal.

She stared at him like he was an unspeakable horror that trumped even _her_ depravity. Which, for all she knew, he just might have been.

What the hell _was_ he? Doing these things to her like he did!

Considering the moment part of a very long, and unceasing nightmare; for perhaps the millionth time did she narrow her crimson eyes and attempt to punch into his brain with her mind powers.

Swirling vortexes of madness and trickery and insanity stabbed and bracketed themselves against what should've been a defenseless, easily picked and sliced mind.

But as was already known to her; her efforts were fruitless.

Nothing happened to him. Where other human beings would've flopped like fishes out of water, screaming, wailing and crying as their sanity was literally ripped from them, her little human man sat there on the ground clear as day, and well as a light Spring rain.

He could feel her ministrations, at least. His eyes always became foggy whenever she tried unsuccessfully to toy with his mind, and sometimes he'd teeter if he was standing.

But the effects were never permanent. He was always immune and she did not know why.

Vertigo decapitated the mental link with a resentful shake of her head. She parted her fangs and hissed shrilly at him, digging back into her meat haunch a second later.

The serpent ripped a slab of flesh away, glaring at him as she chewed.

Solemnly, the little human man blinked rapidly, drowning in the truest bafflement he'd experienced to date. He looked at the ground, then his own feet extended before him in line with hers ahead, and then he looked at her.

"_Mm._" He grunted. It wasn't discernible if this was meant to be a statement, pun, or question.

Vertigo didn't give a garden snake's ass either way. She flexed her scaly eye-ridges, as if daring him to continue the debacle further.

Wordlessly, he took in her feedback and decided to better himself with a quaint retreat. The man nodded, bowed on the ground, and silently stood himself up to begin putting the fire out and cleaning up the leftover viscera.

Soon, he had an armful of bones, undesirable meat and organs wrapped up in a bundle of tied fronds. He hefted the mass in his arms, and cast the dinosoid a final look of longing.

Vertigo played with the cleaned bone of her meal, stewing in the mess she'd made of herself. Her blue and green scales were now marred and were a shadow of their usual beauty and litheness. Grease stains and meat drippings were everywhere, and ran in brownish-gray trails down her breasts, her stomach, her face and even her arms. As if to mock him, her tail whipped, and she tossed the bone at his feet with venomous stock.

_Begone,_ she waved him off, sucking on some of her fingers.

The man grunted and, of course, obeyed, as he always did. He put down the frond bundle and stuck the newer bone into it before hefting it off for the rubbish heap he kept on the edge of her little domain.

The serpent was still stewing in her own deranged cocktail of libido-induced mortification by the time he was finally gone from her presence. His bare feet crushed the grass silently, until his sweat-glistened back vanished around the bend of a rubble pile nearby. The ancient temples sprawled around her without comment, and yet their silence was no less reassuring than a mockery presented by a jostling crowd of onlookers.

_Finally, can I breathe._

Vertigo let a rumbling exhale overtake her bodily actions. She deflated like a gas-bladder whose cap had been eased open by prying fingers. The serpent leant back onto her palms and arched her chest for the dark, crimson sky above, her eyes seeking countenance, or, perhaps _wisdom_ in the twisting, hellish clouds swimming up there.

_Thank the Cataclysm he's gone._

-But truly, he _wasn't _gone, and she knew he'd eventually be back to clean up her refuse, or build her another pile of bricks, or he'd stand there with her in brewing silence as had often happened. He was a silent, occasionally grunting little _thing,_ rolling around her ruined, empty skeleton of a realm like an idling beast of burden.

Even now, where he was so cemented into her daily thoughts; the ripples in the crimson clouds were beginning to look more and more like the chrome sinews beneath her human's skin.

_Fuck this._

Vertigo snarled, dragged her finger through a grease trail down her stomach's arch, and popped the decorated finger into her mouth. The serpent jumped to her feet, endeavoring to rid herself of these fantasies today.

_I'll go where he won't follow._

Vertigo spun to face the east.

_I need a view of home._

* * *

-0-0-0-0-0-


	3. Chapter 3

**Tasting Vertigo**

**3**

* * *

What passed as _home_ to Old Earth before the Cataclysm was a far cry from where her incomprehensible flesh was born from.

The neverthere was a strange place that wasn't defined by physical existence, or the definition of materials, flesh, bone and steel. The neverthere was a goggles' lens put inside water and left to freeze in the grip of ice. It wavered when it fancied itself mad, and it remained straight when it fancied itself cruel. It in and of itself was an echo of Vertigo's nature, and she unto it in a likewise fashion.

There was something disturbingly familiar and yet foreign every time she reached out into the aether to consecrate it to herself. The tenuous and malicious energies of her home existence were always unpredictable and mentally unstable things, where one day they might yearn to uplift you, and the next they might hunger to consume your eyes.

Finding the neverthere was a challenge before anything else. Even to one such as herself; a prodigy and aspect of madness, the realm would constantly recede from her like a thick oil spreading through water. She was constantly forced to drive her probing with some measure of reckless force, just to catch the ebbing waves of immaterial sludge before they could snatch away from her fingers.

Eventually, though it was proven through trials of toil and malevolence; Vertigo found what she sought. Things became drenched in silver, and the air didn't make sense. There was no sky, and there was no ground, and here there was a single plane on which everything occurred in three dimensions, and one dimension all at once.

Where this would destroy others' minds; to Vertigo they were all signs of a nostalgic communion with times past. To her, the waxing and waning of breaking space, and the impossible fathoms of defying understanding were the passing of landmark trees on a familiar path.

Everything was where it was supposed to be, and also not. The Flux of Torment was as loud as ever, as a million tortured souls systematically screamed, wailed, laughed, cried, ate each other, fornicated and murdered one another in its endless depths. Though, she recalled the Flux a little to the left last time she had passed by it on an earlier visit. She took in her feelings of insomnia and lapsed memory with a gleeful smile.

_I'm home._

There stood the Pylon of Understanding, the obelisk that was colored every shade and hue known to humankind and dinosoids, while at the same time maintaining a colorless grayness that spoke of untold knowledge.

There was the Pit of Decadence, warbling and flexing with eternity, with visions of every material pleasure known to exist fabling in and out of it like thousands of flying sheets of paper. There was the Glutton's Folly, where it was rumored that in the unstable dark, legions of damned sociopaths lurked, constantly finding and consuming their own severed legs.

The entirety of her journey was marked by the delicious passage of suffering, anguish and marred confusion. It was blissful to her, and she regretted that her visits to her purest turf were so limited by her spectral distance.

Though, for however enjoyable it may or may not have been, she could not lose sight of the following:

This was all just a parlay.

Some of the permanent solutions she sought? They were not here. They had never been here, even before her fall from grace and her departure after the destruction of her palace.

Her life's footprints that had scarred the neverthere were why she was here. She was here to baptize herself in her past failures, to remind herself of how far she really had come, even if Urth was the current cesspool she rotted in.

Taken by the hands of a legion of her very angry neighbors (to which, the serpent could still purr in appreciation of the fruits of her dastardly labor despite her eventual defeat) -there her temple lie, in pieces, and very much destroyed.

The Madness Stone making it was blasted to immortal ruination. The pillars were gone, and the gates did not bar her as she passed under their swooning gaze. The ruins themselves practically sang in the swirling nonsense of the realm, chorusing themselves at the return of their ill-fated source of servitude.

Vertigo saw armies of lustful mountains, reaching out to touch her with trembling hands. She did not gratify any of them, passing with the resplendence of a beautiful dancer through them, too prideful to stain her visage with their grimy fingertips.

_How I was worshipped here! _

The serpent's long chops breached themselves in the form of a smile. She felt more bashful in the grip of madness than she had in centuries. She twirled, and stepped and skipped among the blasted remains, ignoring the leering skulls of her servants who had died here, and the piled bones from their outwardly sacrificed limbs.

_How I was Queen of Insanity! How I trembled with ecstasy._

Such things were undeniable. They all bored into her breast as a reptilian and deep thrum. Her tail lithely followed in her wake, twisting, turning, flowing like a band of manipulated, liquid adamantine.

_My godhood._

-Vertigo breathed as she silenced her dancing. She leapt over a rise of Madness Stone and landed perfectly beyond it with a crash of her heavy heels upon the ground.

She did not mean to sound tinny in that regard, but the nostalgia was acutely overwhelming. Her own insanity masked her defeat through the celebration of things that had been definitively lost to her. She could never get what she had back, and yet, here, she was ecstatic for such a thing.

_Here, there lies stone, buried, forgotten. It has nothing to do with-_

Vertigo ran her fingers sensuously down the crevice of a wall's destroyed corner. She tested the sensation of the rock on her digits, hearing the imbued and screaming souls of the deranged whose energy had been expended to create it.

-_Flesh._

The serpent's joy funneled from her like puss bleeding from an ulcer.

_Flesh. Begone with that._

For awhile did she lean against the stone, her shoulders edging and her hips balancing to focus weight on one of her feet. The dinosoid considered her ministrations with a keen eye and decided that her unpleasantness had indeed followed her home.

_It's that planet. That cesspool._ Vertigo growled deeply in the back of her throat, and cast a final judging glance about her immaterial surroundings. _It's the only servant I've left._

What was she doing here, truly? Lingering? _Wandering? _What was the purpose of this cryptic delve into the past?

So what? Her temple had always been a thing of material possession. Maybe once in the past had she coveted wealth, but now, life was about the simplistic approach of not just survival but of _preoccupation._

The wars were over. They had ended. She no longer had anything to wager in the political and military fields of Earth. The other dinosoids rightly assumed her defeated, as did the human warlords. Nobody was coming to save her, and nobody was coming to kill her. She'd been doomed to purgatory, and, ironically, in her quest for preoccupation; she found herself fleeing from the only thing that held it.

_How chillingly annoying._

Vertigo looked about the ruins of her once-queenhood, and dropped the act of her memories with a foul sneer.

_One day, I will move on from you._

The Gallows were falling into a pattern of dusk, which meant very literally that not much was changing. The sky here was always dark, and crimson, and the trees were always sagging, what with the rife corruption born on the air.

The ruins of her old temples, and the demonic shrines that had existed there before her cult erected them sighed stark shadows of relief on the land as the sun lowered. The evil embedded in the Gallows' sinews was ever so present during the late hours, moreso than during the daylight ones.

Anyone else from outside this place would have trembled at the very thought of being caught out here at night. One had to wonder what kinds of supernatural beasts wandered the dead woods? And the blood jungles ringing the southern and eastern fringes?

What ghosts walked the graveyards and haunted the ruins? What demonic hosts resided inside the ziggurats and the blasted temples?

As Vertigo exited her lair and thought about the rumors that had been spun about her realm, she offered everything a bodily answer to represent her own considerations on the matter.

The serpent ducked through the gothic, cracked arch of the buried shrine entrance, and squinted in a narrowing of concentrative effort.

Lifting a leg and sifting her tail in a diagonal protuberance; the serpent voided a pocket of disruption in her bowels, and thundered the air with a loud fart.

**_Fttt~ _**-it snapped over a blast of carbon.

_It's only me here. _

Vertigo craned her shoulders back and yawned, her snake-jaws widening, unhinging and bearing her throat to the sky. As they snapped closed, and she enjoyed a slapping of her chops, she picked up on a vocal disruption that marked an acute difference in her prior calm ambiance.

Throwing a surprised glance by her heel, she saw her little human man who had been seated on a pile of rocks outside the shrine, evidently waiting for her to emerge from her meditations.

Unfortunately for him, he'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she had practically shot him right in the face with her anal-air-discharge.

Now, he was coughing, and covering his face. The display of flailing limbs and hacking lungs might have proven hysterical to observe on a day that she was feeling well. But she _wasn't_ feeling well today. In fact, she was still in a pretty bad mood.

Failing to apologize, the serpentine humanoid rolled her crimson eyes, reached over and plucked the human from his spot like he was weightless.

Hanging him in a grip before her scowling face, she observed him with the same expression an angry owner would offer a disobedient dog. He swayed with her fingers firmly- but gently -adhered to the center between his rear neck and his shoulders. His face still showed that innocent confidence without fail.

_If it pleases you,_ his face read to her, despite her power, despite her great strength, despite the fact that he hung several feet from the ground. Vertigo almost whined at her inability to break him.

_Why do you toil over me, little man?_ She quirked an eye ridge, leaning down and placing him back on his feet before her. _Why do you procure me food? Why do you stay here? You do not worship me as a god, and you have no reason to stay beyond having a menial purpose. Why do you do it?_

The man processed her silent quizzing with a grunt, though if he regarded the possibility that their language barrier was preventing a great understanding, she did not know.

She _did_ know that his actions were- as always -driving her bonkers.

Her little human, waltzing around down there on his bare little feet, looking up at her with that dark haired little head, and undeniably trying to read her with those white little eyes.

His eyes were centered with a dull hazel. In this moment of her _wishing_ for alacrity; she noticed that fully and completely. She wondered how such tiny organs like human eyes could hold the amount of wisdom and power that they did. The eyes of her human underling were worth more than the eyes of thousands of others of his kind she had witnessed. What was the reason behind that? Was it because of her own ideals, or…?

_Answer me._

Vertigo snapped her jaws and growled down at him, her bladed fingers undulating in their knuckled, strong mountings.

Only coming up to just beneath her breast line, she noticed how close in stance he was to her as she attempted to unravel him. Coughing one last time, and yet still entirely wordless, he took a step back and peered at her with conviction between her reptilian protuberances. For just a moment, in the evening glare, she noticed his eyes wandering, which they seldom managed. She had always figured her own eyes were gripping in and of themselves to his kind. Vertigo herself sometimes couldn't part with them when she beheld her own reflections in pools of water or on surfaces of glass.

But this straying he was experiencing wasn't from _that._ He wasn't lost in her eyes, he was lost in… something else.

_What?_ Vertigo hissed, letting the snake's vocals rattle out of her throat. She spread her clawed arms wide with lack of understanding. _What do you see, man-thing?_

He produced what she at first thought was a grunt, but it actually turned out to be something quite different.

"_Amm-hmm._" -The little man bundled a fist over his lips and cleared his throat, even though his choking fit had long been lost to him.

Hadn't she just soiled him with a bodily outburst mere moments ago? Did that really mean nothing?

_Of course it doesn't,_ she chided herself with annoyance. _I've kicked him, berated him, screamed at him, roared at him and knocked down that little block monument of his more times than I care to count. I could probably rip a limb off and he still wouldn't care. He'll just look at me. Like he always does. With those white, hazel little eyes, and that rounded, flat face. And he'll roll his shoulders, and stretch his legs. All those muscles, moving around and rippling and-_

Vertigo blinked.

_Stay focused, wench._

_What is the problem?_ Vertigo tried a softer approach to their language difference. She merely lifted an eye ridge, and tiredly moved her chin in a slight sway. _Point,_ she ordered, gesturing to herself.

Now the human was never quick to maintain contact or directly indicate anything about her or on her person. That was just part of the unspoken deal they had always maintained.

You see there was a degree of mutual benefit here. Urth was a cruel and twisted planet, riddled with blood jungles, wastelands and destroyed metropolises in the wake of the Cataclysm. Humanity had always been united under powerful techno-barbarian tribes, marauder groups, scrap kingdoms and junk empires. Outside of those, your best hopes for survival were either being a tough, single-person-army badass, or joining a group of bandits or nomads. In the Gallows, people and even predators were afraid to trek here, and in addition to that, _she _was here, and people still feared her even though her empire had been lost.

Vertigo was an assurance of protection, and she had no doubt that part of the reason he had stayed with her for so long was because of that point.

On the flip side, Vertigo questioned her own ability to live _without_ the pampered lifestyle she was used to. Before him, it had been legions of serfs and brainwashed cultists who had fanned her, prepared her food and built idols in her image. Now it was just him. And every day that was the role he was single-handedly filling. He hunted for her, cooked for her, cleaned her refuse, prepared her baths, and in some cases even picked her teeth and her toenails clean.

-Granted, their relationship seldom forged onwards into the realm of physical contact. She hadn't needed his assistance with something so fickle as… _grooming_ in a very long time.

But her servant knew her body, and certainly, while there had been times in the past where he had gawked (she'd always assumed because there was nothing else to gaze upon in this cesspool of a land) -it had never proven to be problematic in his efforts to appease her.

Maybe that was why he was remaining silent now, and refusing to answer her question. Or… maybe it was because he couldn't understand her.

Not that it mattered. These gesturing and grunting and humming contests they sometimes held were nothing but amalgamated shitshows that she reviled most of the time.

Sometimes she wished she could use her powers to instill a language in his head. The old Slitherspeak of her own origin would have been nice. Though Vertigo didn't know these days how she would fair attempting to use the tongue. She hadn't spoken to another sentient being in decades, and had become quite used to the animalistic and bestial hissing, roars and rumbles she used for him.

_Cat's got his tongue? How weak._

The serpent sorceress huffed impatiently, and did her best to trace the shorter mammal's gaze. This road eventually landed on her torso, and by extension her chest. More specifically, he was looking at her…

…wait, why was he looking at _those?_

_These? _Vertigo attempted with some degree of annoyance. She reached up and touched one of their globular tops, her taloned fingers compressing plushly into the mass of the organ without so much as a thought towards the reaction it might cause. _What about these?_

Vertigo had always been a creature steeped in her own self importance and superiority, but one thing she had never quite learned about humanity due to her disinterest in anything but their servitude, was their organic, or fleshly habits. There were just certain parts of their bodies that attracted more attention than others. Vertigo never viewed herself in such a light; but the obviousness of her gender couldn't have been more apparent through the sculpture of her body's form.

Vertigo's hips and her defined torso were but an hourglass representation of her femininity to the extreme. It left nothing to be hidden and, generously speaking, she was not a being of petite wholesomeness.

The organ she was grabbing couldn't quite fit in her claw entirely, and her inhuman methodology prevented her from seeing the significance in that.

It had always been a problem to the little man, but ever since she had started acting so differently, the change had also come over him in a sense. It felt like every other night, that his guardian and master dinosoid would twist her serpentine form or bustle across an open space at just the right angle for… _stirrings_ to happen. Now, heedless of that, there wasn't a bit of certainty in that thought process for him at all either.

She was the only other person around in the Gallows, and though she possessed the head, neck, claws and tail of a beast, he would be a vagrant in denial if he tried to impress upon himself that her humanoid figure _wasn't_ enticing.

Such a statement would have remained as nothing more than a boldfaced lie. He had always lived his simple life with honesty and integrity. Even if that honesty and integrity was geared towards nothing at all special beyond butchering meat, stacking stones, filling baths and scooping shit; it was still evident and a major part of his internal chivalry. To be undone with it would be an affront to his quiet person.

_Talk, damn you,_ Vertigo released her breast and glowered down at the man. Though she understood the simplicities in human behavior; his movements presently stumped her. Did this mean that he found her chest a pleasing section of her to look at? Or was it a strange part of her to him? Did humans _like_ those anyhow? To Vertigo, the appreciate of another creature's physical attractiveness was the study of musculature, and the gleam of skin and the complexity of the face.

She'd seldom experienced such attrition to her self-centered ways before. Her position as the sorceress goddess of snakes, madness and insanity didn't leave much room for courting. Though, keep in mind, her memories delved into decades of time spent trying to create the empire she had so recently lost. Maybe, just _maybe_ there was something that vast, arduous road of thought that she was missing…

_Nope._

-Vertigo was drawing a blank, and her servant/companion/slave/…. _whatever the hell he was, _wasn't even grunting at her in his normal forte.

He at least was focused on her face again, having apparently shaken off whatever strange sensation had been overruling his judgment.

_Don't be foolish; you know what he was doing._

The serpent- for the first time today –allowed something radically contrasting to burst through her foul mood. What could be perceived as the rattle of an entertained naga bounded on hopping curls from her breast. Her human watched her in silence as he came to realize that the dinosoid was giggling.

It was disconcertingly uncharacteristic for his master.

"_Mm?_" He grunted, blinking in surprise.

_Never mind it,_ Vertigo opened her mouth, tapping the air with a heavenly, yet alien laugh. She got her general message across; dismissively swatting her claw as to brush away any further intuition from him. _It isn't important._

She looked at her palm in the dark glare of the Gallows' lit evening. From where she had touched her messy skin, her claw was now glistening from the grease she had allowed to fall all over herself during her dinner. It reminded her of two things, and, neither of which were pleasant for her.

One: it brought back the awkwardness of their prior exchange.

Two: it meant she was absolutely _filthy,_ and while that was fine for a while, as she maintained that right to be filthy when she so pleased, after awhile it became grossly underprivileged and beneath her.

_You're too comfortable with me,_ she wanted to tell him, but only managed to communicate a rattling, deep and tired hiss to him.

The human processed it as something completely different. This little grin was born on his flat lips, and he stepped closer, motioning once to her feet and then to his chest.

_All is forgiven, master._

He bowed his head in a respectful incline, and then did something out of her prior questions.

He reached out and _touched_ her. Right on the ankle.

It was a brushing glance of his fingers; something so entirely innocent to him, and yet outstandingly brash to her. Though, this time the contact did not anger her as it had earlier during meal-time, it still flustered her.

Vertigo reclined from his touch with a lamb's mewl, reeling back as if a god of disgust and sludge had pressed a disgusting wad of oily tentacles to her flesh.

Quickly, as the dinosoid retracted and stared at him with anguish written on her long face, her servant corrected the situation by stepping back resolutely, and giving her space.

"_Mm._" He grunted lowly, shaking his head and looking at her legs.

_You might not have meant to offend, but that isn't the point, plebian._

Vertigo's tail and spine shivered, like she'd been caught in a cool, Wintery breeze. Overhead, in the crimson sky, a pair of black pterodactyls made their screeches distantly heard throughout the heavens. They were a pair of black daggers far off in the clouds to the north. Already, the air was becoming permeated with the croaks of mutated crickets, and the ghoulish silence of the encroaching night.

Vertigo realized with a slight sag of her eyes that today had drained her. It didn't make any sense because she hadn't done anything involving any degree of exertion. Even her ritual inside the underground shrine to visit the realms of madness hadn't taken any sort of toll or baggage.

_How weak of me,_ she realized, smelling her own emotions like they were a sulfurous sign of her own indigestion. _Is that what I think it is, or is it the grease?_

The serpent raised her wrist and offered it a regardful, and deep whiff, immediately wincing afterwards.

_Grease._

She looked down at her human servant, where he stood idly in the dark, preoccupied with something by his toes as he stared at the ground.

_You, _Vertigo hissed calmly, rolling her wrist at him to gain his attention. She cupped her index and thumb together and made a twisting motion with them. _Prepare my bath. _

Blinking, it took him a moment to collect his thoughts, incline his head, and scurry off to the north of where they were both standing.

"Mm." He nodded in departure, grinning, and rubbing his hands together with a trained slither on the air. _I'll do that._

_Hold. Wait._

Vertigo's resultant rumble stilled him in his tracks, though he doubted that even on a light jog he could've outrun her with those longer legs of hers.

The dinosoid crossed over to him with two steps, placing herself highly before him in a single, swift movement. He felt the hairs on every inch of his body stand rigid at the closeness of his companion's presence. Vertigo radiated the magical powers she was so feared for in the form of a staccato and constant _buzz_.

If it weren't for the curious smells of the grease and meat-drippings, her scent would've been far more pleasant to behold for him, as was a product of the stringent perfumes and oils she constantly doused herself with during her extensive grooming episodes.

The serpent lowered on her knees until their radically different faces were leveled, her crimson eyes glowing in the dark, and her tongue flickering between her snout's puckered tip.

"Mm?" He grunted, utilizing the only bit of vocabulary he knew in an effort to figure out what she was doing. It was so odd to both of them, that even after all this time they had been etching out a master-servant gig in the Gallows, that they still had such a hard time reading each other.

_A product of our pasts,_ Vertigo considered, her nostrils flaring as she smelled him, and her eyes hungrily dousing their heat by gliding across those delectable muscles up-close. _Mine of ruin, his of… whatever his is of._

In years prior, such a question as to her human servant's origin would be to her like the questioning of a laboratory rat's origin. But now that he had ascended his sole rank to such a fine point with her, Vertigo touched a vein of curiosity in that regard.

Where _did_ he come from that he felt so unwanted? That he felt he could never return? And that he had no other option but to stay here in these rocklands, and pamper a big, haughty, self-absorbed dinosaur female?

_At least he's very good at what he does… normally._

Vertigo swallowed every part of her that was telling her not to do what she did next. It was the byproduct of her insanity. One edge was angling for one answer, and another edge another answer. She was a dueling mishmash of personalities. Some of them hated him, some of them were indifferent, and some of them…

…How did she describe it?

_Hunger?_

Close enough. Though her belly was full with the meat he'd fed her, there were other parts of her regal body that had remained empty for time immemorial, gathering dust, despite their prime status and ingenuity.

_Aren't I beyond flesh? Aren't I beyond these dumb, ass-scratching monkeys that I've toiled with my entire existence on this planet?_

Vertigo raised one of her four-fingered claws- large enough to wrap around his head and crush it, like a large plumb –and she opened her taloned fingers towards him experimentally.

_But to what end do I speak? Behold! He's not dumb, and he does not falter at my touch, or my presence and-_

Not only did her servant reach up with his hand and place their warm palms together, he smiled, and wheezed minute _laughter_ at the contact. Where his smaller hand quivered at the touch, and hers remained resolute like stone, they could both feel the difference in one another's hides.

_-and he is delectable._

He was soft, and _warm,_ and brittle. Vertigo was cold, but heated all at once, plush, and she carried thicker weight. Her skin was slippery, and leathery at the same time. His was blanket-like, and paper-thin.

_How do some of his kind become such powerful warlords with such frail forms?_

She spoke of some of the human leaders who had beaten her and destroyed her temple in the neverthere. She did not recall any of them like she recalled this man before her. They had been creatures of stone, and stalwart stubbornness. Could humans really be forged and corrupted into such machines of war, she wondered.

_He is calculative,_ she observed, seeing his eyes dance about their interlocked palms. She saw his fingers twitch, and his lips tug into a grin. _He is… brave._

Her servant looked at her face, as if he had forgotten that she was there with him in that moment. His other arm came around, and before Vertigo could pull away, she felt his thumb circling tenderly on the green and blue striped scales of her cheek.

-_Foolhardy-! _–She mentally cried.

The dinosoid gasped and voided control of her own muscles. For just a second of time did she weigh into that touch, a side of her weaker self desperately clawing for control of her brain's reigns, fighting through the resistance, rabidly seeking something taboo and different and hidden in her bestial person.

Quickly, consolidating her composure; she stepped back with hurry and reeled from him. The mighty serpent deity hugged herself, her scaly thighs interlocking and grinding in perhaps the weakest display of fright she had ever afforded another living being.

She truly had gone mad! Behaving like this in front of a human? A little meat-bag mortal, a _rodent._ He was nothing compared to her lineage, her godhood, her-

_Bath,_ she ordered him, though with less gruffness than her prior demands had been stationed upon. _Bath, now._

"Mm." He was flustered too, and pink as a peach with the amount of flush flooding his cheeks. Her little human man nodded vigorously and rushed away from her, leaving her to simmer in her own lack of composure.

_What a time for life to catch up to me,_ Vertigo's chops parted in agony. She clawed and pawed at her own body, making to apply some kind of ineffective retardant to the impact his touch had had on her. _What is this hunger?_

She knew what it was, and she'd be damned if she could accept its arrival at the behest of an _ape._

_There are needs, wench._

_We have no needs!_

Vertigo grit her fangs and stomped away from the site of her confliction, taught, and wrung with trepidation. As she made for the old ruins she used as a bathhouse, she passed the center of the Gallows, stalking with venomous disregard towards her throne, and towards the pile of bricks that he had rebuilt from the ground up, and that she had toppled with her dismissive motions.

_I am Queen of these Gallows! I do not need anything from common, mortal scum such as the likes of that monkey!_

The reptile was stalled in her frustrated stride; as apparently, during her meditations, he had rebuilt that very same brick pile.

The fallen chunks of masonry were back up and at their fullest height. The hill was rebuilt, vaguely square, and standing erect before her with perhaps a defiant air about its reincarnation. It stood like a statue just ahead of the foot of her lounge throne of rubble, warding her path, watching her with a judgmental, unseen eye.

Vertigo snarled, and she promptly kicked the mound with a swift implant of her heel. The bricks crashed and tumbled and were reduced to a lowly, dusty heap.

_How _dare_ he rebuild my monument without my say!_

* * *

-0-0-0-0-0-


	4. Chapter 4

**Tasting Vertigo**

**4**

* * *

The chamber that he sought was located deep in the bowels of one of the many ruined plots scabbing the Gallows like a sprawl of assorted corpses. It was as lonely as it was populated solely by the company of vines and fungus patches, and the air here was heavy with humus and the thickness of moisture.

When he had first been brought to the dinosoid's '_Royal Bathing Chambers' _–as she had so kindly endeared it as, the room had been in disrepair and was a blatant, bleeding sigil of Vertigo's destroyed fiefdom.

In the past, when her insane cult members had populated and fortified the Gallows, they had constructed sprawling ziggurat complexes in Vertigo's name. While it was true that nothing in the mortal plane of the Gallows came anywhere close to the horrid, leering majesty of her extra-planar temple in the neverthere; the fortresses that her followers had created were still a technological series of marvels on their own.

The Gallows had been dominated by the underground meditation shrine that Vertigo used to commune with past allies, and threaten her enemies over great distances. They had been centered by the Ring; the giant dome that had once stood where he and Vertigo constantly spent their boring days. The Ring had collapsed in on itself, now, all that was left were teeth and ribs of sculpted stone sticking from that great hill. Vertigo had pieced together as much of her old throne as she could've managed, and it was that gross amalgamation of stone corpses that she lounged upon so commonly, watching him stack bricks, and cook her meals.

He normally did not allow his thoughts to stray outside of his simplistic, and angular directives to act as her butler. But in light of that, he had always compared that crumbling throne and the bathing chambers as two very important ghosts that continued to haunt this land.

Vertigo was a queen of coveting alacrity. She tended to orbit around the things that spoke volumes of her greatest past and now forgotten deeds, and she also tended to hover around things that she found as important to maintaining her self-image.

Every _night_ did the dinosoid lounge in the baths he prepared for her in this ruined, moss-grown chamber. Every evening did she vanish into the old underground meditation shrine to gaze into what he knew was the neverthere. Every afternoon did she lounge on that crumbling throne. Every day did she keep him around and watch as he tended to all of it.

The Fallen Queen! Hark ye! Trapped here with those things that were all she had left to hold onto.

Her bath, her throne, her meditation shrine, and _him._

_Me?_

The man did not possess much of a grasp on language, thus, he alleviated such a direct word of Old English in terms of general meaning. That was what he was thinking as he filled the great stone basin with steaming water.

_Me? Part of that?_

How long had he served Vertigo? Fallen Goddess of Snakes and Insanity?

Like a crab picking through the rotting folds of flesh on a fish's corpse, he had to dig and sift through plenty of nonsense in order to find the answer he sought.

It had been years ago that he had crawled out of the blood jungles of Severed-Eye, lost, and alone, abandoned and not a part of any warband, tribe or scrap-fief.

He didn't remember what had attracted him firstly to the Gallows outside of his own desperation to avoid death. For some reason, he just had not seen relevance in attempting to sell his services to bandits, or marauders. Probably, did he make that choice wisely; as times had been particularly hard, and he had little doubt that most people would have rather shot him than taken him on as another mouth to feed.

Whatever the case had been; it mattered not any longer. He had clawed himself free of the jungles, and the mutants and the predatory flytrap plants, and he had waltzed into the Gallows seeking… _anything_ really, even something to grant him a swift demise.

All he had found was Vertigo, a goddess, surely, and a mighty dinosoid who commanded voodoo powers and mental abilities far beyond his scope of understanding; but a lost and alone soul just like him for all purposes.

He remembered acutely the defeated methodology that the seven-foot tall reptile had taken towards their encounter. He remembered how he quivered with revelatory fear when he first saw her, a blue and green stain of slender scales and powerful, inhuman muscles atop that crumbling mound of bricks she called a throne. He remembered how her eyes had looked like rubies, and how they had turned to regard him with a seething malice hidden beneath a carpet of toxic disinterest.

He remembered how disarmed she had been, as if she had been expecting to remain in isolation for all eternity here, in this field of hills and ruins.

_Years ago._

The man sighed as he twisted the metallic crank on the rim-hatch of the irrigation sump. Sprawling mechanically from the rear, crumbling wall of the bathing chamber was a funnel that acted as the neck for one of the only pieces of infrastructure left from her old cults.

The irrigation canal was dug and constructed with wood barriers for almost two miles to the Gallows' south, where it collected water from the Toothed River and channeled it here. Once the canal had fed water to the entire grouping of temples and forts her diluted followers had built.

Now, it fed only a bathtub, and how ironically venomous was such a thing at the end of the day? How his master's kingdom had collapsed, and her borders had been skewered, and now all that was left to power was a _tub?_

Sickly. It was all sickly. Not just the defeat Vertigo had suffered, but the entire situation.

He was a handy man. He could cook, he could hunt, he could even read the Old Languages of Urth before the Cataclysm. He could _not_ understand Vertigo. It was very true.

He served her, surely, he fed her, he even groomed her sometimes, and he entertained her with his mortal presence; but he did not understand the _old_ her, the Goddess of Insanity that had called her body home before the current lingering failure.

He would never tell her that that was what he thought of her lineage. That it was corrupt, and _wrong,_ and that she certainly was a shadow of her former glory. Though, she probably assumed with correct demeanor that he did think that way, she most likely did not possess any incentive to _care_ either way. She was self absorbed, conceded, temperamental and depressed, but she wasn't an idiot.

The dinosoids enjoyed just the same level of intelligence as humans did. While there weren't nearly as many of them as there were the latter on Urth, they could still hold their own. The man had only met one dinosoid in his life to come to that conclusion, however. It was the one that he was currently filling the bath for.

_Acting strange,_ he nodded sagely as he creaked the sump handle completely closed, and the steaming water stopped sloshing into the basin beside him.

He was right in that regard. But then again, they'd _both_ been acting strange.

How long had he been here in the Gallows? Two years? Three years? _Maybe_ three and a half? That event he was previously thinking of when he first come here and seen Vertigo on that throne was… _ancient,_ it was so long ago!

But that had been how it all started out! He showed up, she looked at him, tried to drive him insane with her mind-powers, figured he was somehow untouchable with him, and then she started ignoring him!

That was what Vertigo had done for the first year or so! She _ignored _him! For the longest of times, he'd follow her around like a lost puppy dog, and sometimes she'd hiss, or roar, or _scream_ and try to scare him away, but he never left. He kept following her, close on her heels as always.

It was only into the second year that he started performing menial tasks for her. He'd scrape up her refuse, build cheap monuments to her out of bricks so she could summarily knock them down, he'd fill her baths, find her baubles out in the wilderness…

-_Eventually,_ she'd let him pick her toe-talons clean a few times. She'd even let him clean her fangs, and rub some of those scented oils into her scales. That was the transition that he didn't understand.

She was a domineering, authoritative bitch who had never given a hell's glance about his wellbeing! And he had been perfectly fine living under that! So long as he was fed, and had housing, and was protected from Urth's horrors by her presence! He was a crux, he supposed, something that was just a _semblance_ of the past royalty she had once earned for herself. Maybe he instilled nostalgia into her, or maybe he was more than that to her. He had never known, and he had never cared.

When had all of that changed into… _this?_

The man hopped down from the sump's ledge and landed on the rim of the great basin tub, his bare feet clapping wetly into the moist, ancient bricks making its construction.

He watched the sloshing, steaming water filling the tub with a self-conscious eye, vaguely detecting his own reflection as it bounded, simmered and danced out there before him.

_She sees something in this._

Never before had he been so interested in examining himself. The nameless servant slowly formed to his knees and blinked at the glassy duplicate of himself with wonder.

Vertigo was always looking at him these days, scanning his flesh as if she was meaning to sum up the choicest portions of edible meat.

There was part of him that could consign himself to that fate, but it was very minute. He knew though that she wasn't observing him for that. Vertigo was quite merciless with things she detested. If she had wanted to kill him, she would've done so already.

That didn't leave very many other options as to _why_ the reptile deity was constantly eyeing him with these awkward expressions. A year? Two years? _Two years. _Yes. Two years of his living on the grounds with her and she'd never once done this before.

What had changed? What did she now see? By extension; what did _he_ see?

He hummed at the raggedy fur-cloth covering his hips. It was the only parcel of attire he possessed, and he had reknitted it, sewn it, cleaned it and picked foliage debris from it an immeasurable number of times.

This cloth, this rag, was the only lock in place that kept him from being in the nude. He wondered if it made Vertigo self-conscious? Was _this_ what she was staring at? His _clothing?_

_Don't lie to yourself,_ he tried to offer with some measure of gentile inclination. _Look higher, and then lower._

He patted a hand about his chest, and then he patted it over his hips, his inner thigh, and finally his groin.

_She isn't bothered by the clothing,_ he realized, his fingers tracing the obscure and seldom-felt complexities beneath the fur. _She's bothered by-_

**_Splash~! _**–went the tub water suddenly. Steaming liquid was throttled about in a riot of disruptive motion, and it emerged from its pooled hiding place much faster than he could dodge it.

The man gasped as a wall of water washed over him, drenching him entirely in lukewarm moisture that dripped from and glistened his skin.

His reflection was destroyed by the violently rippling water, and as he staggered back to collect himself, he saw just who the culprit had been for this rude interruption.

The tub was deep enough for shoulder-level on the average specimen of his kind, but to Vertigo, the water level stopped just at the understand of her breasts. The serpent- who was entirely under a spell of ignorance as to his presence –let loose a satisfied rattling in her throat as she settled in the steaming bathwater, closing her crimson eyes, and blotting out the stresses of her world.

_Ohhhhh… the heat,_ Vertigo swooned in her mind, lavishing over the brilliant submerging of her body. She let the steam waft around her scales, and she let the mess she had made of herself come off in the forms of tiny brown trails in the water. _How lovely._

Nearby, her little human grunted in query, slapping his hands about himself to fruitlessly bat at his soaked hide.

Vertigo's brows tightened as a healthy origin of her daily frustrations interrupted her heavenly moment. She pinched open a blood-red eye and regarded her servant wordlessly.

"Mm?" He grunted again, annoyed as he kicked his leg and sent droplets flying across the tub's rim.

_How fares your bath? _He must have meant.

_Acceptable,_ Vertigo nonchalantly shrugged. She dipped to her hands and knees with a soft sloshing sound, so that soon only the tops of her shoulders and her neck poked free of the wafting, thick surface. Behind her, the water splashed as the rest of her long tail finished following her into the tub's depths, sliding like a massive, wet lamprey across the brick floor of the chamber's lobby.

The human cleared his throat and grunted, tapping a hand consciously about his fur cloth for no particular reason. He nodded in acceptance, his eyes darting about the wavering, blurry outline of the dinosoid's reptilian body.

_I stare at her too,_ he realized with a slight cringe as his mind struggled to grasp what he was feeling. He had seen human women long ago in the past, before his ousting, before his trek through Severed-Eye. He was a man and no longer a boy, and thus he understood the biological implications of what was supposed to incite interest in a man and what wasn't.

He didn't know how it worked for dinosoids, but if nothing else, aside from her tail, her scales, her hands and feet and her face; Vertigo was very _human-ish._ She was very female. She was very… _developed._

_Where are my oils?_

The man blinked rapidly and looked at her.

Vertigo's claw dripped as she snapped her fingers, gesturing to the south of the dark chamber.

_Get them._

He grunted, bowed, and hurried over to where she pointed.

Lying against the wall were a series of jars and urns that each were filled with heavily scented perfume chemicals and old styled oils. They were vestiges of times past, when Vertigo would have legions of followers to cater to her every whim.

This was part of her pampering procedure. Every day, he would cook for her, he would prepare her bath, and he would drag out the scents she decided to choose for herself that day.

_No,_ Vertigo leaned against the back rim of the tub, her long neck propped from the water like that of a curious sea-serpent's. She shook her head when he hefted one of the heavy urns aloft for her.

It was lavender scent, a pinkish urn with black fronds from the aforementioned plant drawn on its ribs with heavy ink. She simply wasn't in that sort of taste tonight, and so it was discarded.

Dutifully, her servant grunted, put the sloshing urn down, and ringed around it to the next one.

"Hm?" He held a smaller urn now, one that was tan colored and roughly oval-shaped. It had inked depictions of a flower on the side. Honeydew scent.

_No,_ Vertigo's hissing sigh drawled out. The water kicked and whispered in the dark of the room as she dragged her arms out of the fray and spread them on the rim behind her, her wrists draping back into the tub. _Find me something regal._

The pattern that followed was one of commonality. She was always this picky, and indeed, three more of the urns did not meet her expectations, and with each denial did her resultant huffs grow louder.

_No! _She finally gave off a loud, serpentine drawl. _Find me something _regal,_ man-thing._

_They're all regal! _–He would've screamed if he could understand what she was saying in her mind.

His concentration was pretty much off, and she was being unusually touchy about her oils selection. In addition to that, his own mind was betraying him and he was staring. It was a huge mistake to be doing that, but something in him felt rebellious this evening.

Even now, as he jumped around the tens of oil casks and the stupid urns; he could see Vertigo eyeing him like a roasted piece of steak.

Those crimson eyes! There they were! She couldn't hide this, and she wasn't even making an effort to! They were practically extending like tendrils from her face and rubbing all over his body. She was staring at his cloth again, and his back, and his chest.

What _was_ this? Damn her!

"_Hm?!_" He grunted in anger, finally pointing to the last and only remaining selection in the pile.

Vertigo blinked at his attitude, took her gaze from his succulent form, and looked at the urn he was indicating. The snake dinosoid purred and allowed a cold smile to spread down her chops.

_Yes please~,_ she nuzzled her snout at him. The man gawked at the urn with horror.

It was the largest of the casks in the pile, and it couldn't have weighed less than eighty or so pounds. He knew it weighed that much because he had tried to move it once, years ago, and hadn't been able to do it.

Vertigo had never chosen this one before, and with good reason.

It was _rose scent._

Roses? What the hell did she want that for? Vertigo? Cruel fallen goddess of the neverthere, of madness and strife wanted to smell like _roses?_

There were so many other scents in that room that she could have chosen!

What about the deceitful scent of spice? Or the doom-speaking smell of juniper? There were so many ironically beautiful things that she could've masked her evil with, and she chose _roses?_

_Why?_

Vertigo's jaw dropped a bit.

Her little human man did the unthinkable.

He did not mindlessly obey her as he always had. This time, he stepped back from the huge, fat urn, held aloft his arms, and _squinted_ at her.

_Is he… refusing?_ Vertigo stammered in her head.

_"__Hm?_" The man was quite agitated, and that much was obvious. He gestured to himself, as if to speak miles of a twig being snapped by the rolling might of a boulder. He gestured to the urn to indicate the latter. _You want me to drag this whole thing over there for you? You don't even like roses!_

_Are you questioning my choice, _man-thing?

Vertigo hissed at him, and her thick tail smacked into the water, twitching and eager from her displeasure.

_I'd question what is happening to you, master! _–He would've told her.

The man stepped back from the oil urns and held his hands aloft to her, pointing at her, pointing at himself, swiping them through the air with an excited rush.

One had to realize that if this had been the Glory Days of Vertigo's monarchy, and he had been one of her cultists; she would've ordered him executed without a second thought, or, she would've done it herself.

What hadn't even been a hairs' length of wiggle room for leniency had turned into a full-fledged toleration of rebellion. If the urns could tell stories, and could speak, they'd all collectively be howling in confused rage.

How could Vertigo, Goddess of Insanity allow this _monkey _to befall her?

If she demanded rose-scented oil, then, by hell she was _getting_ rose scented oil!

_You have tried my patience today again, and again,_ the water crashed and slapped as the mighty dinosoid rose to her heels, and stalked towards the other end of the tub. _You dare to disobey my orders? I have _requested_ nothing from you. I _demand_ it!_

Mind you, as she traversed the tub on the whim of killing the rambunctious simian, there were still delays of grease and filth that were actively agitating her scales. Though plastered with a non-discreet sneer, the serpent swatted some of the bathwater up in her palms and drenched it over her chest to rid herself of some trailing vestiges.

_I wouldn't even need those oils if your pestering and antics hadn't made me so dirty! If you were not to blame for soiling my beautiful coat!_

Vertigo snarled at him, halted briefly by a stain on her clavicle that would not subside despite the rinsing. The man stood on the soaked edge of the tub, and watched as his doom waded ever closer by the second. Not-so-strangely, he didn't seem to be much impacted by the potential consequences.

_We'll see how your confidence, and your mind hold up against my foot! I don't need you! I've _never_ needed you. _

Vertigo spat, and slapped, and shook herself vehemently, upset- as she usually was –over things that her poor servant probably didn't even comprehend doing to her.

_Even now, you mock me with your apish eyes! What. Are. You. Looking at?!_

The serpent roughly spiraled her palms over her mammary glands as she reached him. Endearingly did she snag them, galled at his gawking.

_Do you mean to tell me that there is something drawing about these to you? Is that was this all this? You're distracted? You're curious?_

Vertigo groaned in contempt, her patience snapping like a fine strand caught beneath a blade's kiss.

_Fine! Look at them!_

The dinosoid swam up to the edge of the tub, gripped her breasts and let them wetly slap onto the bricks there, draping them like bulbous, loose and vestigial extrusions.

_Clap~! _–her sumptuous, scaly mounds went. They jostled as a pair of luminescent, green/blue hills, moving under their own weight and idling with reserves of sifting fat.

_Is this what you wanted?_

Upon seeing this, her poor servant went pale as a ghost, and then, in mimicry to the shifting shades of a rainbow; he began to change colors!

First there was white, then there was a green almost like her own scales' green, _then_ there was red! Finally, there was _pink! _Hot pink! He looked like a candy-person! A statue made of bright pink strawberry candy.

_They're for feeding young! _–She naively shook her head at him in astonishment, falling prey to her own ignorance on the subject of humanity's darker, and professionally unspoken tastes. _Have I misjudged your age? Or the customs of your kind? I do not think males feed off of their mothers for that long, and I certainly would never stoop myself to attempting to feed _you.

She had never looked at him in such an animalistic way before. Certainly, she'd acquainted him with all sorts of ignoble beasts under the sun in the past, but… _this?_

Is that what these distractions and these odd behaviors from him were all about?

He was _hungry?_

That didn't make any sense! He was an intelligent little monkey. He knew better than to seek something like _nourishment _from her! This was madness!

Vertigo blinked and looked down at her bosom, remembering the scaly coloring and patterns that showed forth her identity.

Madness? How ironic! Maybe her powers _had_ worked on him after all!

This was a disaster! She couldn't even look at him in this moment of awkward miscommunication. He did not cough, grunt, or move from his rooted spot. She could see him now in his little human head; flaring like a deer caught in headlights at this discovery.

Vertigo felt a touch sick. All this time, she had been examining his body, _hungering _for that special kind of internal touch at the thought of him.

The reality alone that she had become so sexually aroused at the thought of a servant, and something so low as a _human_ was spiritually destroying enough to begin with.

But now it turned out that while she'd been burning with fire, that he was thinking with the mind of a hatchling?

Breasts were for children! They were meant to feed young, and they were simply a necessity for female biology! Didn't all people think that way too? Isn't that how it worked for humans? And other dinosoids?

Vertigo suddenly felt her guts twist up inside her.

….Isn't that how it worked? Or…

-was it just her?

_Human sexuality._ Vertigo creased her brow. The snake snorted wetly, balled her shoulders, and hoisted her upper half higher out of the water.

She looked at him closely, until their noses were almost touching. Her human was still as stone, hot, pink, shivering, and was averting his eyes purposefully to the west of the bathing chamber.

_Human sexuality. Is this what I think it is?_

Vertigo wasn't a fool. She had researched humanity extensively. She knew all about their customs, their various languages and their cultures and how they behaved. It made everything all the more easier in her past quests to subjugate them and military defeat them.

_By the Cataclysm; what have I done to myself?_

Vertigo felt doubly ill with herself.

Of course!

She _was_ a fool! She understood humans _militarily,_ politically, _behaviorally._

She did _not_ understand them sexually! That must be the answer! Male humans liked…

_-Breasts?_

Vertigo peered ponderously down and past her own collar. She squished her upper arms together as to cause her organs to bulge so she could get a better look at them.

These were a ticket to human men's attentions, apparently, and even as she examined their rounded, scaly, plush forms, she could still fathom that minutely.

_But they're for feeding young… I… I do not understand._

The dinosoid grabbed one of them and offered it a quaint squeeze, until rolls of its flesh protruded between her knuckles. She rarely had offered herself much bodily attention. All those years spent on conquering, and enslaving and fighting hadn't allowed for it. But now that she was actually experimenting a bit, she had to admit that the sharpness of her talons, and the pressure on her glandular organ right now was… _enticing._

In fact, Vertigo's expression became morphed by the sudden outburst of euphoria in her chest. The serpent released a flamboyant coo, and such was unintentional. She squeezed her breast harder, until it began to hurt.

_This feeling…_ -The goddess blinked drunkenly. _This is… this is fantastic!_

Eagerly, and with the speed of a gleeful youngling who had received a brand new toy; Vertigo took both of her claws, and she roughly mashed her breasts together.

She was oblivious to what it was doing to her man-thing. The human now could not hope to avert his eyes. He was utterly transfixed, face crimson, mouth straight, expression unreadable and wholly intoxicated.

Vertigo jammed her blue/green bosom together, like they were a pair of soft stress-balls. Stress-balls bigger than her head, granted, but as such nonetheless.

She squeezed, pressed, and rolled them, her sinuous back arching, and her tail curling gracefully upwards, and protruding between her ripe buttocks in the tub's water via its spine.

_Absolutely fantastic! This is golden! This is-_ Vertigo's mouth jarred open as she wrung her thighs together. The heat of the water and the friction caused by her scaly hide triggered an eruptive announcement that culminated in her groin's trench. _–Oh my~!_

No amount of warfare, or cult creation or brutal enslavement could ever have prepared her for this. She was utterly at the mercy of her own body in that moment. Vertigo leaned against the edge of the basin tub in desperation, pressing her breasts until they bulged like blue eyeballs between her collar and the bricks.

_I need more._

Vertigo opened her mouth, and a strange sound that he had never heard from her before came out.

It was somewhat of a snake's hiss, as usual, but it was deep, and thrumming, and it was laced with a cooing undertone.

It didn't take her servant long to figure out what it had been. He realized with flushing cheeks, that he had just witnessed Vertigo, the Goddess of Snakes and Insanity _moan._

He was probably the only person to ever have done so, and he didn't even know the full significance behind that. Not that it mattered.

_I understand now!_ The dinosoid was thinking triumphantly, digging her top fangs into her lower chops. _These looks we cast one another have been-_

-Her tummy flared as she hit a sensitive portion of flesh with her thigh-grinding.

_-mutual~!_

"…._Mm?_"

_What?_

Vertigo's crimson eyes fluttered open. She stood in the steamy water, and remembered suddenly that she wasn't alone.

The man stood there at a complete loss of what to do. His face was beat red, his arms were straight, and angled outwards in a rough triangular abashment.

He finally looked afraid of her, she saw. He was _shivering,_ he was gazing at her in terror! He was finally broken!

By the Gallows' Lineage; she'd done it!

_Ha~! _Vertigo smiled fully, and _laughed_ at him, at least, in her own reptilian way.

The dinosoid rubbed his nose into her victory, quite possibly, a victory that only _she_ could comprehend.

_Your smartness, and your cunning, and your innocence!_ She ripped her claws away from her breasts, and poked him between his pectorals, making him stagger back and gasp. _–I've beaten you! _

Flustered beyond all reasoning, and confused, he merely blinked at her with the expression of a brick wall.

_We now see who dominates the Gallows! All these years have you been so content, and so free with your actions with me…_ Vertigo smiled venomously, leaning closer, until her hot, steamy breath was casting like a trail of ghosts across his chin. _Who is submissive _now,_ man-thing?_

He shivered at her closeness, and she noticed him swallow. He only did that when he was trying to hide things, she knew. What could he possibly be hiding after all that? Some unseen game? Some _intricacy?_ She doubted it. She called _bluff_ on it.

_Stay down and admit it,_ she smugly grinned, her eyes trailing down his torso, and then lower, and lower. _I knew that you couldn't comprehend my beauty, and my awesome form. I, the Goddess of Insanity, have always been ahead of you, my pet, and now that you-_

Vertigo frowned when she saw his loincloth.

She knew his attire. She knew it was the only strip of material that he wore, and she knew that it normally wasn't… _bulging_ like it was right now.

_Tenting? Protruding?_

The dinosoid's victorious mood swung into something of apprehension.

_He is… erect._ She snorted. How dare he.

What did he think this was? Some kind of _permission?_ Simply because he was who he was to her, and because she was exposed to him? He thought that he could initiate a _mating exercise?_

How dare he.

_No! _Vertigo snorted again, like a fuming bull. She stepped back from the edge of the tub, squeezing her breasts together again as her needs ate away at her. _No, that is… that…_

Her bashfully turned-away head strayed, and she pinched an eye open to get a second look despite her somewhat-tacked revulsion.

_Those muscles…_

-Now he looked even _more_ delectable, she saw. How much more could he replicate the perfect image of a dinosoid female's sexual recreation? Did her kind not all have that in their ideal mental-eyes? A competent male with streamlined flesh, and slender build, a raging boner sticking out with the pride of a knight's lance?

Certainly, he didn't look as confident as he could have been, but he was fueled and _active _right in front of her eyes. The idea was taboo to her, it was strange, and _gross,_ and exciting all at once. She felt a tad like she was tempting herself towards a beast, or an animal.

Vertigo locked eyes with the human predatorily. He did not know what to do. Thus, he was still as ever, and did not move from his spot.

Without conscious thought, Vertigo stared at his loincloth, practically begging herself to rip it from him and see what was beneath it, but somehow managing to still herself.

_No._

_Yes!_

_No!_

_YES!_

-_I can't take this anymore. I don't care._

Vertigo fell backwards into the tub, until she was seated on her rear end at the other rim's top. Her knees and lower ankles were still submerged, and she soaked the bath's edge with her rising presence. The dinosoid used one claw to grip and tighten over her breast, and then her other one dipped to between her powerful, thick, and reptilian thighs.

Her servant's mouth flapped open as he saw a part of her he seldom saw.

Now, granted, this wasn't the first time he had laid eyes on that peculiarity. He had washed her down with her oils, and he had rinsed her with this bathwater in the past. His glimpses had always been quick, and without detail, and Vertigo had never seemed to care.

But now, as Vertigo was actively transfixed on his loincloth, her blue and green body turning near black in the gloom of the chamber, he saw her reach down to touch the glistening organ with all purposes and intent.

Her crimson eyes flickered between his legs, and to his own gaze. The dinosoid regarded him briefly, and with a slight gesture of her chin. She let loose a tiny hiss to him, and then he started to hear this _squelching _noise.

The order couldn't have been clearer.

_Don't move._

He couldn't have, even if he had wanted to.

As she was so intrigued by this alien, awkward thing that was unraveling in the room, so was he. His evenings where he sought bodily release normally came few and far between. But he had known enough of their hunger to utilize his hand in the past, and for the longest of times, that had sufficed.

But now, as he watched Vertigo's bladed fingers dip into this cauldron-shaped hole between her legs, he wasn't so sure of his fingers' accuracy and satisfaction.

_Vagina._ The word echoed in the back of his skull. He had read it in many ancient texts from Old Earth, papers and records dating to pre-Cataclysm civilization. _What does it feel like?_

Vertigo used at first two fingers to experimentally breach and part the exterior flaps of flesh. It opened a quivering tunnel that was mostly sealed by undulating little rolls of pinkish-red meat. The whole thing was glimmering with moisture that was not only from the bathwater. It ran in fleeing trails down her crevice, and dripped occasionally onto the rim of the tub beneath her.

The painful bulge beneath his loincloth twitched so violently that it jolted the entire article, and made him grit his teeth.

Vertigo hissed soothingly, her eyes widening at what she saw.

_I don't care,_ she repeated in her head. Her fingers worked more deeply, and eventually two of them vanished into the ravenous maw down there, where they were suckled and coated in feminine drool. _If I can't bring myself to touch him, he at least can watch as _I _touch _myself.

The dinosoid was completely drunk on her self-satisfaction. She couldn't see straight, and she was actually having a hard time focusing on his crotch. Whereas he was cold, and mortified by how quickly the situation had devolved, her inept understanding of human sociality made her entirely immune to any hesitation.

To Vertigo, it was an indifference.

So, she fingered herself in front of _one slave._ It was just one! And she wasn't touching him, and he wasn't touching her. It was acceptable, if not something she knew would remain hidden.

_Here I fear for my reputation when I already have none to maintain,_ she figured more logically than she had been lately doing. _It's just to take off the edge. I've been moody. I need this._

She actually felt a little bad that she had knocked down his brick monument so many times today, and that she had roared at him, and kicked him like she had by the cooking fire. As she swiveled and dug her nails into her serpentine, vaginal folds, she realized in the glow of the moment how oppressive she had been, and she regretted it.

_This lightheartedness!_

Vertigo craned back her neck and hissed shrilly. Juices ran out like torrents of molasses from her, slipping down her digits with thick, curiously scented viscosity.

_More!_

The dinosoid rapidly swiveled her index and middle fingers into her hole, causing a wet squishing slick to echo around the chamber. Her feet twitched in the water, and she lifted her one breast up to her mouth, closing her toothed maw over its green, supple areola.

Just as she had taken a hands-on approach to her dilemma, soon through Vertigo's masturbation did she hear her human making noises of his own.

She could hear his breathing, and she realized that in her attempts to see what he was doing; she was caught in an endless room of darkness.

So she opened her eyes and watched across the tub. What she saw made her throat clench and choke her.

Her man-thing had ripped off his cloth.

He was touching himself just like she was.

She'd seen the thing before, just as he had seen her. Again, only in brief glimpses when she had been too prideful and too unused to him to care.

It had always looked like a tiny, pink, floppy thing to her, dangling between his legs without a sheathe, and an exposed scrotum. She never understood that last bit in terms of evolution. So many other species contained the gonads _internally._ Why had humans been cursed with this exterior, ugly _sack_ swinging around down there?

_I like that sack,_ she immediately determined, seeing his organ at full length, engorged, and protruding with the hardness of a bone. She rubbed herself faster, until her tongue started to slip out of her mouth. _It looks bestial, hanging, covered in fuzz, heavy and… and…_

Vertigo's hiss turned into a shrill outcry. She was forced to release her breast as she stabbed into her hole with repeated thrusting finger-dives. She leaned back into the floor and hammered her hand into her pelvis, squelching her flesh, sending tiny, thin gobbets of nectar jettisoning onto and around her knuckles.

The human was on a certain edge too, though in a different respect. He clenched his hand in a circular grip around the midsection and base of his pylon, and he softly jammed his hand in a stroking motion, that bundled the flesh in either way and caused the pinkish, fat head to bob.

For awhile, as the bath water lost its heat and the steam started to simmer, it was just a game of mutual stroking and friction.

Vertigo watched his penis moving, and twitching as he began to encroach upon the end of his own road. Its alien makeup and the way it shifted and pulsed made her hole perspire even quicker, and her euphoric spasms go faster.

_I wonder what it would feel like?_

Again and again did she plough her fingers into her canal.

_Yes! _–She began to sigh and hiss and rattle. Her frills arched and her tail whipped out of the water repeatedly.

Across the seemingly infinite barrier between them in the form of the bath basin; her human was gritting his teeth, and something stirring was happening below his belly.

In spaced, organized kicks; his masculine spire was releasing bands of a white, glistening material, that were thrown thickly into the air, where they sailed, and terminated in tiny pats on the bricks of the floor,

Some of the globules sailed further, and plopped wetly into the bathwater. More and more of it kept coming out, and the dinosoid marveled at her servant's vitality.

_Vitality? Or build up? How long has he been thinking about this too?_

Vertigo didn't know. She rarely knew when it came to him.

Still, when her own end came, she wasn't finding herself too preoccupied on the semantics of it. Her trench tightened, walloped and began to flood around her fingers with reserves of syrupy nectar.

Vertigo opened her jaws and sighed raggedly at the chamber's ceiling, feeling steaming, hot rivers of her own fluids etch down her groin and pool on the rim of the tub.

She could've stayed that way for another century, like the one she'd spent in defeat. Her folds continued to move, and roll and kick. Onwards and onwards was the flow continued, and she wondered just how much longer she could ejaculate without becoming dangerously dehydrated.

Overhead, she heard her human's feet pattering on the floor. She rode down her orgasmic finality and looked at him with difficulty across the tub. He gave his simmering erection a final jolt, and stood there with his penis going limp, watching her with wide eyes as she continued to hammer herself.

_Oh, look how his organs _hang_ like that… like… like some kind of beast's would._

She growled as another ejaculation gripped her. She could feel a wall of ice developing, and then splitting for a steaming tsunami in her crotch. More juices flowed, and some of them ran off the tub's ledge and sluggishly trailed like streams of clear oil in the bathwater.

_…__This is… it's…_ The dinosoid's eyes shut as she stopped rubbing herself, and leaned back her long neck to contemplate her own actions. Now that her hunger had been satiated, she began to use her madness-gripped brain again.

_What did I just do?_

Footsteps attracted her attention. Vertigo sneered at the room's ceiling, lounging on the rim of the tub. She ran a claw down her snout and glared at her side, where she saw the awkward stance of her servant idling.

He had garbed himself with his cloth again, and was purposefully avoiding staring at her belly and lower. On her rear, she was just as tall as he was, and the two of them stared at one another in translucent silence, attempting to decompile what the other was thinking.

_What did I just do?_

-Evidently, he was less abhorred by the event. He bowed his head, and reached out with his hand, flattening the palm, and teetering back his wrist.

He wanted to touch hands with her again, like she had made him do earlier.

A gesture of affection.

Had she _really_ let things get this far?

Hadn't she _wanted_ it to get this far?

_…__I…_ Vertigo appeared pleading, and as she slipped her fingers from her hole, she almost went a step further. A brief and fantastic scenario played out in her head. She envisioned grabbing him, wrapping arms around him in the most blatant form of contact they'd ever had. She imagined squeezing his smaller, lithe and delectable body into her, pinning him beneath her breasts, touching her nose to his and licking his salty skin. …_No._

The serpent snorted, and the water splashed as she took her ankles out of the bath tub. He quickly lowered his arm, seeing that her usual self had returned despite all that had happened.

_Begone._

Vertigo actually turned her hips from him, as if she hoped to hide what had occurred right before his eyes. Her face was flushed, and her body quivered in mortification.

_Go away._

She waved her claw in the air for the chamber's wide exit, her eyes screaming in silent embarrassment, her throat clenching, and her mind reeling. He did not take his disobedience further than he had, even though he wanted to.

The nameless servant hiked his fur loincloth higher, bowed his head, and hurried out of the chamber without another noise or pause.

Vertigo stewed in the steam of the bathwater and her fading libido with a tortured concession of her own weakness.

She felt more relieved than she had in decades. But she also felt disgusting.

_Fuck, _the serpent spat and stomped her foot. _I hate how good that was._

* * *

-0-0-0-0-0-


	5. Chapter 5

**Tasting Vertigo**

**5**

* * *

The morning sky was a mixture of twisting reds, toxic yellows and foul browns, rendered almost scabby the haze of mist and dew.

The air was always cool at the beginning of Urth's new days here. Vertigo knew it wasn't like that across the whole planet, but such intricacies had never found themselves liable to leave her except through her travels.

Her military conquests had brought her to lands far and wide. She remembered the hot, and humid blood jungles, the cold and unforgiving mountains, and the incinerating power of magma fields.

All of those places were so far behind her, where they once festered under her banner of madness. Now they were all returned to whoever- or whatever –had owned them before her indoctrination. She could feel them, like ghost-limbs, floating out there in the soup of the world, separated from their matron and fleeting for it.

She had truly fallen. She had truly been driven to an all-time low, and this she gathered with dread and a lack of understanding. It was foolish, because there wasn't much to understand in the first place.

She couldn't exactly go back in time and change what had happened.

And she wasn't talking about her empire being crushed.

_What did I do?_

-The question would not stop echoing around in her mind, bouncing through her skull like an eager monkey swinging through banana trees.

Her recollections were sour-tasting anathemas that bubbled up like stew from her cerebral cortex and simmered across her frontal lobe. It was as if her mind was attempting to shield her from the trauma of it through the use of a thick covering of membrane to shield her internal-eye.

_I don't want it to be shielded._

-And this was what bothered her.

If it wasn't bad enough that she had… _touched herself,_ and exposed her royal body to a rodent, she was now conflicted over her own absorbing of the event.

Vertigo could not bring herself to admit it. She had _liked_ last night. In fact, she'd _loved_ it. She hadn't felt so physically good, and pleased in… she didn't know how long.

Empire-builders did not have time for the flesh. Never before had she seen the vibrant accuracy in that before now. She had plagued Urth for centuries, seeking its subjugation; she'd never attempted to take a king to sit beside her while she'd done it.

_A king._

-That at least roused her normal attitude. She could scoff that easily. _Kings_ were weak, because males were weak. True intellect and cunning could only come from the refined personality granted to a female. By definition, in the order of things, was nature inherently matriarchal. It only made sense that the most powerful of rulers- and of course, the most unsung –were female.

_Enough,_ Vertigo's jaw rolled as she chewed, and she waved her servant off with her normal, dismissive gesture of her hand.

Unlike what had been happening the last few days, it seemed their romp the other night had set things in order for him, or had snapped him out of his confused idling.

Her man-thing did not pause at all. He quickly nodded, ushered out a usual grunting noise, and stepped back, placing the clay bowl of fruit at the foot of her rubble throne.

_If you desire more,_ the gesture said. Vertigo sighed, her mouth full, and ignored it. She swallowed the wad of berries, felt the complacency of her full belly, and lounged on the stone in the morning glare to continue her maddeningly commonplace internal bickering.

_This would not be occurring if he knew Slitherspeak._

_We are not talking about him!_

_Him?_

_The _rodent!_ That abomination by the foot of my throne!_

_You mean that delectable strip of muscle fibers and vitality?_

_I mean that _rat._ He has soiled our image. You saw what he did! Casting his bodily fluids so unkemptly at me!_

_-Only in reaction to what you were guilty of._

_I am guilty of nothing! Nothing but the enjoyment of my privilege!_

_And what is your privilege, Madness Lordess?_

_I am Queen of these Gallows, and if I wish to finger-fuck myself, I have every right to do so in my realm!_

Vertigo growled, her eyes trailing on the shorter man as he stood idle and without direction by the foot of her crumbling throne.

His face was as unreadable as ever, and if not for the behavioral correctness that he was currently employing, she'd swear that he didn't even remember that night, or at least was very good at hiding his memory of it. He didn't look impacted at all. There was no internal confliction, no guilt, no befouled guile. As usual!

_That little bastard. Look at him! He's probably boasting over some sort of conquest! I bet he's even thinking about it now! How I've been lowered to be his drooling, fawning, buxom egg-bearer!_

Vertigo felt a touch ill. So with a tiny snarl, the snake disdainfully lashed her foot out, and promptly kicked him.

**_Thwack~! _**–went her heel against his chest. She immediately frowned at herself afterwards for how _lightly_ she'd hit him. There was no force behind the rough nudge only because she still could not physically harm him.

Her anger may have been on the bubbling rise as always, but that invulnerability that he enjoyed to not only her powers, but her _rage,_ was still in place.

_I hate him. I hate him, I hate him, I _hate_ him! _

-Good gods, she was becoming obsessed! The dinosoid queen growled and clawed at her own face, shielding her eyes and gritting her fangs.

Obliviously, her man-thing picked himself off the ground, dusted his cloth rag, and huffed, standing rigid in salute.

Of course, what did his demeanor say for him unspoken?

_If it pleases you, mistress._

_Gah~! _–Vertigo felt like sobbing. _Rebuild my brick-pile!_

She hissed lowly and pointed at the sprawl of rubble in the center of the ruined Ring. It was still toppled from where she'd kicked it last time, being nothing but a sprawl.

_Do it now!_

Her servant grunted, cast her one last look, and obeyed.

As always, he started with the bricks on the furthest edge of the pile. Brick by brick, he hopped on his hands and knees and picked them up. The process was always long and arduous. Normally, she enjoyed torturing him with the bland complications of it.

Now she couldn't observe his scampering for meaninglessness without a sharp edge of indigestion.

She tried to swallow her bile through the remaining berries he'd harvested for her breakfast. As the bricks clattered, and he began to re-stack them for the millionth time, she snatched the bowl off the foot of her throne, kept it in her lap, and munched on crimson berries as she watched.

Minutes became several more minutes, until an hour went by. Vertigo actually marveled at his persistence. He did not look at her once as the bricks slowly began to reform into a rectangular mound. Up and up they went, until soon the crude monument to her kingdom was erected once more.

Almost as tall as his shoulders, he topped it with a final brick, dusted his dirty hands off, and turned back around to her with an exerted breath. He hadn't even broken a sweat.

_It's done,_ he said, unspoken. _Your monument, master._

Vertigo licked some of the crimson offal from the berries off her chops venomously. It was like with each lick was she trying to hide a curl in her chops and a sneer on her snout. She blinked her ruby eyes, and went to shove another fistful of berries down her throat.

-But of course, her talons scraped on the empty bottom of the clay bowl and were granted nothing.

Like a stumped simpleton, did the serpent dinosoid look inside her breakfast bowl as if seeking more of the food. She snarled at the barrenness of everything before her, and looked at her servant with malice.

_I'll show him…_

-Her tail twitched as she considered what to do next. She wanted to knock the brick pile down again, like she always did, smash his efforts and his care and watch him pick up the pieces.

_Did you never think about why you do that to him?_

_I do it to assert my authority. He needs to know his place._

_You do it because you hope one day, you will do it enough that he won't _want_ to pick up the pieces._

_They're just bricks! Meaningless stones!_

_You still never picked up your own pieces._

Vertigo's face flushed.

_You bitch._

_I speak truths, you conceded, slippery, cold, dirty and self-pleasuring little newt._

The serpent huffed and hopped off her throne.

He watched with wide eyes as she dropped the clay bowl with a heavy _thud! _–at his feet, and stalked around him and the pile with her normal reptilian swagger.

_Pick me more,_ she scratched at her fang with an inquisitive nail, pointing at the bowl in her departure. _Your monument is tolerable._

She walked right past the bricks, and didn't knock them down. Her servant stood, alone, in the Ring without any semblance of wit.

Why hadn't she destroyed it? She always destroyed it!

Was she being… _merciful?_

Merciful!

With a horrified gasp, he stormed forwards and knocked the pile of bricks over himself. _Crash! _–it went. Dust flew, bricks rolled and bounced. He gripped his shoulder from the force of the impact, and stared with unkempt anger down at the slick of rubble.

_Vertigo! _–He thought. _Come back here this instant and punish me!_

* * *

-0-0-0-0-0-

He found her wandering on the edge of the Gallows.

Here was long past the ruined temples and forts that speckled the land. Here there were jagged hills chanced by sporadic and dead woods comprised of charcoal tooth-pick trees. The grass here was a navy green, scabbed and wounded with large tracts of brown and black.

Pterodactyls circled above, occasionally screeching, ringing in the air like hungry vultures. Vertigo seemed transfixed with the silence of this place. Her eyes were uneven, and her head was cast back to glare at the crimson sky.

She almost seemed to be communing with some far off, ancient intelligence, breaching the veil of dead Urth to tap into the elder reserves of the past.

-He could've been exaggerating that description, but there was certainly depth in his master's eyes. The dinosoid that he had served for all these years was changing right before him, shattering the veil of conformity on a whim.

He approached her across the open ground, his height still dwarfed as he only came up to her ribcage. Her arched back supported the spine of her long, serpentine tail. Even now, he could see it twitching with almost calculated patience, like it was waiting for him to come closer as to snatch him up and constrict him.

_Can she do that with her tail even?_

Her body fascinated him as of late. Her reptilian, female curvature was undeniably gratifying. Her full legs, her hips. His snake-lordess was exotically beautiful.

Even the cobra-like frills that flowed down her neck, they were minute vestiges of her power, and her presence. They made her look regal, like an eagle would become as it spread its wings.

_Mistress?_

Vertigo cast an eye down at him as he gathered by her flank, looking up to her in the silence of the hills. The wind was meek, and it whispered over both of them. The pterodactyls were quiet, and they were drifting highly above towards the west, as if in a hurry to leave them to their own devices.

This close to her did his eyes start to wander again. He swept them here, and there, drinking the endless cup that was of her majesty to him. He had been staring at nothing else for three years. By this point, every inch of her body was burned into his mind.

The green and blue patterns wavering over her scales. The litheness of her long neck, and her long tail. The thickness of her legs, and the contour of her back. Her shoulders, her chest. She was… she was unbelievable to him.

But so was he to her. The disconnect was, that she was off-put by her past as a god.

She couldn't comprehend being with a member of a race she had deemed as _pests_ for so long. Her deified ego had burned any deeper considerations of humankind away. They were either chattel or rivals to her historically.

But now, that wasn't the case anymore. Humanity had beaten her and had moved on, and all that was left out of anything was this little man-thing following her around the Gallows.

Nothing but a single human, a single little ape, a single little delectable, fleshy thing.

_Vertigo,_

The dinosoid's eyes narrowed as her maddened personalities began to hail her.

_Vertigo, we have never taken you for granted. We've questioned your choices, and we've questioned your integrity; but we've never questioned _you,_ do you see?_

_The Old Times are gone. They are never coming back. You are no longer Goddess of Madness. You are the Plebian of the Gallows. You are nothing. You have lost. But you do not have to be _miserable_ while you are lost._

_You obviously want to, and there is no reason to stop it from happening. That creature by your feet is a consenting, sapient organism. A _person,_ as much as it may revolt you to admit. He has cared for you for three years. He is beyond the realm of suspicion._

_All you have to do is kneel._

Vertigo's chest fluttered, her cheeks flushed and she turned away from him.

_You're insane,_ she suddenly cackled.

_You've been insane since the neverthere shat you out in its momentary lapse of judgment. _

_Consigning all those beneath me to doom…_

_He is not a simpleton. Let him help you in a way you can't even help yourself with. Lower yourself, lift your tail, beckon the human. He'll know what to do._

_You're insannnneeee~! _–She sang.

_You said that already._

_I know I said that already! I know, I know, I know! You stupid, acidic, mentally disordered immortal! Stop ranting to yourself! You lose sight of what's important! We were meant to live after the fall of our kingdom for _us!_ We were meant to live for survival and preoccupation! _

_Yes?_

_Yes! Preoccupation! Why do we scream and yell and roar, when we could fill ourselves with that man-thing? When we could preoccupy our days in our fallen empire by letting him ravage us with his alien, human form?_

_Yes…_

_His limbs are sweet! His muscles sleek and narrow just the way we like them! He is fast, and durable and strong! He will grip me and claim me! He will hold me down and subjugate me, as I've subjugated so many others! _

_Yes!_

_I will have this!_

_YES!_

Vertigo thought the loud, rippling sound upon the air had come from her, as a direct result of her internal triumph.

Yet, even as she felt the lessening of weight from her many personalities subsiding in contemplation; she knew that something was not quite right.

The serpent's frown was palpable.

Her thoughts had been interrupted by a terrible, loud and snarling report.

Her crimson eyes meshed to the top of a nearby hill, and she saw its source.

_Mistress!_

Her man-thing was still beside her, and her hide rippled from a pleasurable jolt as he touched her armored wrist. It was enough to take her gaze from the peril above. Vertigo looked down at him, and she felt something rise in her breast that she had never felt before.

It was warmth. She realized that she was looking down at the human with not domineering sway, and not even dread.

She felt elated. She was looking at him with _care._

_Mistress! _He grunted, his eyes wild, his arm extended and his finger pointing.

_Behind you! I am unarmed! I cannot defend you! _

It was too late. She heard the thing's heavy paws thudding down the hill in a boisterous charge whose weight was made ten-fold by the downwards incline in the land it followed.

In seconds it was upon her. Something heavy crashed into Vertigo's flank with the force of an oncoming freight train. Had she been a human as him, the impact alone would've shattered her ribcage and bent her spine. But her supernaturally reinforced dinosoid body absorbed the blow and was not lessened for it. Still, her elbow rent chunks of earth in its wake as she bore her fangs, and was dragged by whatever was atop her into the earth.

She slid ten feet, digging through the grass and dead soil before coming to a halt at the foot of a pencil-thin black tree from the hill's woods.

The serpent shrieked as something sharp pressed into her flank. She wildly kicked her legs, whipped her tail and undulated beneath the thing pinning her.

There was a heavy snarl, and the felinoid clap of vocals born into a growl. Vertigo found her weight and bottomed out. She put her palms into the dirt, flushed herself off of them, and planted both her heels in a solid kick into the creature's midsection.

The monster howled and flew away. Nearby, she heard it thud and toss into the grass, giving her a chance to right herself.

Vertigo hissed raggedly and flipped onto her heels with a trained acrobatic precision. She unsheathed her finger talons, revealed her fangs and hunched in her stance towards her attacker.

At this close of range could she now pick out the details in its golden, brown-striped hide. Paws bigger than her head dug into the earth whilst it flopped on all fours and opened its thick, fang riddled throat at her.

Though shorter than its intended prey, this was only because it was of a quadruped stance where she was bipedal. Two amber eyes centered with dilated irises narrowed, and a puffy little tail that contrasted its bestial, freakish appearance kicked excitedly at the blood-rush.

Vertigo had to admit, that she hadn't ever seen such an awesome specimen of one of its kind before. It was positively the largest bull she'd ever witnessed to have existed.

It was a Saber tooth cat, with huge front legs and a barreled chest, it positioned itself to pounce, intending to come back to her for a second attack. Its face scrunched hatefully and it revealed its two horrid fangs.

Vertigo heaved from the adrenaline rush, and despite that did she watch the cat with a developing, and wild grin.

_I've stared into hell itself, beast. I do not fear you._

-And that was precisely the problem in the coming seconds, she realized.

The saber cat _knew_ she didn't fear it. That was why it had attacked her merely to stagger her, and move her away. The feline turned towards its real goal, and sought to take it from her.

Her man-thing was unarmed. He did not have a bow, or a blade, or a spear or even something so lowly as a big stick. He could not outrun the cat and there was nowhere for him to climb or hide.

He righted himself from the ground, clutching at his chest, his eyes wild, glancing between her and the monster dividing them.

The saber cat snarled, and then vaulted from its space away from her, towards _him._

_No!_ Vertigo denied with a fervent gasp. _Stay away from him!_

Though the predator enjoyed its felinoid reflexes, she could accurately counter them with her serpentine fluidity.

In mid-air, as the big cat was about to land upon her servant did Vertigo slice in from the south, her arms hugging around the saber's rear haunches, her talons rending jagged, crimson trenches into its furry flesh.

_Die, beast!_

The saber screamed as they crashed to the earth. Chunks of dirt and grass blades flew everywhere, dust catapulted like the plume of a mushroom cloud from under the feline's belly.

The saber rapidly fought through the inhibition, viciously attempting to right itself so it could not be denied such easy prey. Vertigo would not let it go. She clawed into its haunches with thick, dragging motions, making to hook the sharpest edges of her nails into the skin, where she used the weight of her elbow to wrench it downwards and split the muscle in a triangular, valley-like fissure.

Blood erupted from the lightning bolt-shaped wounds she carved into its rear legs, spraying over her chest, her belly and her neck. The blood glistened as it thickly matted her shoulders and ran down her fingers.

She hadn't felt the touch of blood in years, not like this, not in the thick of battle. She actually couldn't remember the last time she'd killed a worthy opponent. That sensation of rolling around, clawing, biting, spitting, screaming, feeling the spray of life on one's face, it had been lost to her for so long.

_I've gotten rusty._

The wounds were merely those of the flesh. They were not debilitating as she had aimed for them to be. In the past, maybe, she could've dispatched the saber cat more easily.

But Vertigo had become lazy for the last few years. All those prepared meals, the weeks and months of no physical activity, and all the time she spent _lounging _were the culprits.

Ironically, so much of that in her life was made possible by the little ape she was fighting to protect.

_Damn him,_ she cursed, even though everything she had listed could realistically be blamed on no one but herself.

The saber cat snarled. A thick paw clapped with the report of a sharp drum across her face. The cat's talons luckily were not on point enough to breach her scales. They blunted like blades slicing down a surface of rubber. Though the blow of the attack still held the force of getting hit in the head with a large stone.

Vertigo's sharp cry echoed across the hills. The saber shook itself like a dog, and she rolled down its ribcage and landed on her hip.

This vulnerable, and the cat could've pounced on her to attack her belly. Goddess or not, fallen dinosoid warlord or not, if a saber cat was ripping at her stomach, Vertigo was done for.

Ironically, her tactically adept profession of the art of killing was spot on. The saber cat was just beginning to whip around to dig into her guts before she could right herself.

Her human had something to say about that.

Where he had appropriated the large tree-limb from, she nor the cat ever discerned. He had probably found it lying nearby, or had snapped it off the same tree the saber had almost driven her into at the beginning of the attack.

Its origin irrelevant, it was the wooden limb's sharpness that came into play. The human knew that as he hefted the limb in his hands, that it wasn't sharp enough to pierce the cat's hide. He needed a vulnerable, soft-fleshed space to jam the head into.

_The eyes._

He aimed for the saber's face.

There was a sickening crunching sound upon the air, and the saber's scream couldn't have been masked for miles. The noise was so otherworldly that it caused Vertigo's servant human to lose his grip on the huge stick.

He tossed back, and the limb snapped free of the horrid wound it had wrought.

The saber cat reeled and rolled and howled. He had taken one of its eyes out.

Vertigo took the opportunity to launch from the earth and tackle into the beast's ribs. The serpent hissed and shrieked as she went to work ending the threat to their lives. Bones crunched in a rugged pattern of crackling snaps and whips, eventually culminating as Vertigo's fingers finished tearing in opposing angles.

**_Plsskkkk~! _**–the saber cat's ribcage popped open like macabre flower's bloom. Blood and heavy ropes of viscera rained horribly across the scene. The big cat's howl drowned as its life fluids bubbled up into its throat and ran through its teeth as tens of ruby rivers.

Perched in the center of the butcher's sprawl was Vertigo, cackling, and hissing with glee as she reveled in the death and horror.

_Die~! _–She was singing, laughing as she toyed with the beast's intestines and tied loops of its entrails around her talons. _Bleed!_

Her active ministrations of the soon-corpse would not go unheeded. Given time and she probably could've vented the last few days' frustrations on the saber until the remains were all but unrecognizable. She'd done it before during the wars, reducing her foes to nothing but gobbets of meat for the crows and scavenger lizards.

She felt like a vestige to be feared once again. She felt like an idol of terror, and her madness showed through it all. The snake possessed a wild, demonic grin as she ripped the predator to ribbons. Her world revolved around this mauling for the longest of times. Nothing else mattered in the face of ripping tendons, popping organs like goo-filled balloons, and snapping bones like they were twigs.

_I've forgotten,_ she thought as she tore out the right tibia, peeling the angled shin back and bearing the glistening bone beneath like it was a grotesque banana. _I always need more, and more once I've started…_

She would've kept going, had the hand not landed on her arm.

_More!_

Vertigo- drunk on the adrenaline –backhanded him out of pure reaction.

**_Thwack~! _**–her wrist went. Her servant flung backwards and landed with a bark of pain on the earth nearby. His agony clipped into her mania and severed her bloodlust with a swift amputation.

The dinosoid produced a concerned sound, and her head piqued away from her carving of the saber's cadaver.

_Man-thing! _–She mentally cried. She crawled over the saber's broken bones, snapping several as she stomped through the viscera to hasten her retreat.

Dripping with the spilt innards of her kill, Vertigo, Goddess of Snakes and Insanity knelt with the most genuine worry she had ever experienced. Briefly, a flashback of warzone after warzone in her old days appeared in her mind. She remembered all the wounded cultists and warriors fanatically devoted to her that she had left behind in the dust. She remembered the hundreds she had forsaken for her own self preservation.

She found it numerically ironic that out of all those mighty cultists and servants she had lost in the wars, that this man, this little ape was the one she was trying so hard to keep alive all of a sudden.

_He is either very special, or I am very delusional._

_Get up,_ she snorted, her bloody talons marring the earth on either side of him as she hung over him. Her servant grimaced though the pain, and stared up at her with grateful eyes.

His anguish was caused by a trio of deep claw marks scarring his chest. It was a glancing blow from the cat when she had been tackled. He was very lucky. If the hit had bitten just a tad more, she was certain he would've lost ten times the amount of blood he had already.

_A flesh wound,_ she was able to deduce with visible relief sinking into her face. He noticed this, because a second later, she felt his hand tapping onto her soaked wrist. He was laughing at her.

_You care,_ he was musing. _I knew it._

_Silence, little fool,_ Vertigo tiredly bowed her head, her cobra-frills depressing into her neck as she sighed over his belly. _Stop laughing._

He knew he was annoying her, so he laughed harder. He laughed more and more than he could ever remember laughing. As the two sat there, bathing in the saber cat's blood together, they placed themselves farthest from Urth than either of them could ever have journeyed, even by going to the neverthere.

Despite the near-death experience, Vertigo and her human companion couldn't remember the last time either of them had felt this good.

Ironically, soiled with congealing globs and slicks of blood, neither of them had ever felt this _clean_.

* * *

-0-0-0-0-0-


	6. Chapter 6

**Tasting Vertigo**

**6**

* * *

Vertigo sucked in a held breath as oxygen returned to her lungs, and the water's surface receded around her like a retreating blanket.

She could feel the blood running off of her scales and becoming lost in the river's movements. Slowly, and with occasional trouble did she become her normal hue of blue and green, banishing the deep crimson to oblivion in the natural reserve of water.

Vertigo inhaled the clear air washing from the Toothed River, and she absorbed the sound of the water slapping, and the distant rapids roaring.

Up to her hips in the rise, she had been made to swan-dip herself multiple times, and she had shot through the water like an arrow in her quest to strip away the saber's remains from her skin.

She lavished in the crystal glimmer of the river, resting her claws in grips just ahead of her shoulders, she sighed again and stewed in the silence.

Nearby, her human servant smacked his palms into the water and doused her hip with the kicked-up wash. Vertigo produced a startled yip and glared at him with her crimson eyes.

The man smiled at her, feigning that he had been scrubbing at his arms the whole time. He subsequently vanished in a large, tsunami-sized wave of water as she rolled her tail in his direction.

**_Splashhh~! _**–roared the river. He vanished under so much force that she briefly saw the bottoms of his feet before those too sank.

The back-forth drabble in her mind did not appear to rebuke her choice of similar antics. Vertigo forgot all about the trepidation she'd been experiencing, slapped her claws onto her knees and giggled at him.

A moment later and his head breached the surface. He spat a thin stream out and proceeded to laugh with her, soaked to the bone.

On the shore of the river's bank, after the last bit of evidence had been swallowed by the water's current, Vertigo sat herself on the sand beside him, dripping wet, her red eyes raised light-heartedly for the gray afternoon sky above.

_The heavens aren't the color of arterial blood,_ she noted, her pupils trailing whimsically through the paths of dark clouds. _There are stories of skies colored crystal blue, like the clearest of ponds, before the Cataclysm. Never before now have I ever longed to see what that looked like._

The serpent dinosoid laid a claw on her belly and meekly tapped her fingers. She looked down at the smaller human seated in the sand beside her, and saw that he had been watching her the entire time.

He smiled at her with his round, pinkish little face, wiping a strand of clinging, dark hair from his forehead.

_What are you looking at?_ She tiredly wondered, nuzzling her snout down at him. _What are you thinking, I wonder. Do you think this makes us equals? This battle that we've fought together? That isn't the first predator we've bested side-by-side. That isn't the first incursion into this realm we've stopped together. That isn't enough of a reason to think things have changed._

He smiled wider, oblivious to her thoughts. Vertigo adjusted on her palms behind herself and leaned closer to him, until her face was hovering just over his.

_But you don't care about any of that, don't you?_

As if he had read her mind, he inched himself closer and touched her.

Her human ran his palms down her mandible, testing the feel of his skin against her snake-scales. He went even further to hook his forearms above her shoulders, and he swept his hands slowly down the back of her long neck, around her frills, and to her carotids.

Vertigo experimented with the sensations this gave her, letting him touch and feel her. His face dawned with childish intrigue. His smile was wider as he was granted permission to bypass her pride, and to indulge in something she had never let anyone else indulge in before him.

_Do you enjoy my coat?_ Vertigo lidded her eyes, her attention absorbed entirely on him in the silence of the afternoon. _You touch it with the same fascination that you touched the Madness Stone with. When I brought you to my temple, expecting you to be driven insane, and be erased from spatial existence…_

Slowly, his smile began to droop and formulate into a frown. He stared as Vertigo's expression diminished, and she glared at the wounds across his chest, where the tied leaf-fronds securing the paste he had treated them with hid them from her.

_I sought to bring you there to cause you harm. …Can I tell you something? Can I tell you something that is very important to me?_ Vertigo's large claws cupped either side of his hairy head, and she circled her thumbs through the strange, flimsy material with interest. _I do not know why I tried to do that. I would not try to do that now. Not after… not after everything._

He produced a tiny grunt, his mouth opening, as if he sought to _speak,_ and the motion made Vertigo's eyes widen impossibly. She stared with dumbstruck intrigue until his lips shut, and he simply nodded at her.

_Do not blame yourself,_ the gesture told her. He was still talking about just the saber cat's claws. Vertigo's resultant, rumbling chuckle was mistaken by him to be out of modesty. In reality, she felt tortured that she could not say what she wished she could say.

Despite this, Vertigo was clenched by such emotion that she attempted to anyway.

She sounded strange, and her throat warbled as the noises flowed unevenly through her unused chords. Her statement was swift, and muttered, and anyone not immediately where he was in her claws couldn't have heard it otherwise.

Attentively, her human bowed his head, and he listened to her as if his life depended on it.

"_….Sssssaaa-siimmmm, sliiiin, csssarrrr…._" –She whispered, her voice as cold as tundra air, and doubly as hollow.

Slitherspeak could not entirely be translated between their tongues, but the meaning was easily defined to one who understood both of their basic linguistics.

Roughly, it was a proclamation of worth. She spoke of his value in not a materialistic, but a spiritual sense. She spoke of his worth to her. What he was.

It meant:

_You matter to me._

The man closed his eyes and marveled at her voice. His expression of bliss modeled something more akin to life-altering music, like he had heard the most beautiful harp's tune.

Quickly, in excited eagerness to return the favor, he opened his mouth again, and his head bobbed slightly as he fought with his own throat, conjuring up a part of his body that he hadn't used in over three years since his arrival here.

"_…cumhachdach…_" –He rasped. "…_boidheach._"

Vertigo knew these terms, they were tribal, and they were _old, _but they resonated with her. She knew what they meant.

_He speaks of the tribes' tongues._

The goddess leaned forwards and touched her nose to his forehead, bumping him, her snake's tongue flicking out slowly, and tasting the salt of his face.

_You think I am powerful and beautiful? _She mused.

He probably would've spiced it up more if he could've managed it, but she had no care for the level of cheesiness. She didn't need him to overdo it. She understood the gesture and was flattered.

Vertigo sighed past her fangs. She puckered the tip of her snout, and did her best to mimic a kiss on his forehead.

_Flesh and mind; I think you are delectable._

* * *

-0-0-0-0-0-

The saber-tooth encounter definitely changed things. The scenario wasn't so… _onerous,_ which took a great deal of getting used to.

As a nameless man, with a loose language, a keen intellect, and a standing as a snake goddess' servant, it was easy to summarize him as a glutton for self-deprivation and write the whole situation off from that point. However, this was quite far from the actual truth. He didn't exactly _enjoy_ the mitigation, such as his master's rampant shooing and the occasional kick. All this time he had merely _tolerated_ them, and after awhile, there hadn't even been any force put behind them to give them much merit.

_Pick me berries,_ Vertigo would order him, throwing a bowl at him, or tossing a leaf frond for him to collect them on.

_Pick the grass from my toenails,_ she'd demand, holding aloft her raptornoid, barbed foot from her stance on her throne.

_Fill my bath._

_Rub me down with this oil._

_Chase those birds away._

_Cook for me._

_Clean up my shit._

-He was surprised that she had never requested him to _wipe _in addition to that last one.

All of those things were petty though. They were to him, what a grandmother's eccentric, aged quirks were to a tolerant family of members who understood her and her intentions.

Vertigo had never harmed him (in any meaningful way, at least) –and any roughness never extended past him getting occasionally knocked onto his bottom. That backhand? Immediately after the fight? That was a first time occurrence, and, if he didn't know any better, he'd say that the constant looks from her were her only means of being entirely apologetic about it. He held no hard feelings because it wasn't logical to.

He'd been in the Gallows with Vertigo for three years, tending to a sulking, depressed and fallen queen, simply because there had been nothing else for him to do on Urth. The world was a shitehole', and there was no getting around that. Marauders with guns, man-eating dinosaurs, _saber tooth cats. _That was all that was outside the Gallows, and even in the swampy scrap-holes that passed for civilization, there were other predators in the forms of gangers, disease, and the rampant, violent bureaucracy clinging to the upper levels.

Urth was a dead world. It still had life on it, but they were all merely maggots, squirming away in meaningless existences, and clambering for piecemeal over a gigantic, rotting corpse. One day, the Cataclysm would finally wipe Urth out, whether through sickness or another earthquake. One day it would end.

He'd been so detached from all that madness (ironically) –for so long, that none of that mattered to him. With each passing year that he had earned his keep in the Gallows, life became more and more comfortable.

It started out with her toleration. Nowadays, Vertigo didn't even raise her voice with him anymore. He was starting to look less and less like a laborer and more and more like something…

…something of a higher stature.

That was an accurate summation. It couldn't get much more serious than that right now.

After all, she still purposefully avoided any mention of what had happened that one night in the bathing chambers. She always changed the subjects, and manically focused on his claw-wounds from the dead saber tooth. She even still labored over and touched the scars after the breaches healed and he could take the frond bandages off.

He had figured he could iron away her discomfort through the passage of time, and even physical contact of his own.

But no matter how many times he polished her scales, picked her toes clean or rubbed her down with oils, Vertigo was once again running into a mental brick wall that he could simply not comprehend. She _was_ the Goddess of Snakes and _Madness,_ after all.

_It isn't that I find you repulsive, _Vertigo tried to explain, giving off a considerate rumble in her chest as she looked down and past her knees, rolling her wrist for emphasis. _It's simply that I am unable to come to terms with the fact that there is an option for sex in the equation. I can't come to terms with it because I'm spiritually a higher being than you. You're a plebian monkey, and my pride, _not me,_ resents that. Do you understand?_

He smiled dumbly at her as he knelt at the foot of her throne, the little brush he was scrubbing the underside of her toe-talon with hissing roughly with his motions.

Of course, he had no fucking idea what she was saying, because she never made words. It was all just hand gestures, and hisses, and rumbles and hums. Most of the time, he got the general idea for basic stuff, like; _help me, _pick this up, put that down, stand over here, stand over there, sod off, eat my shit, you know, _simplicities._

But right now, as the days kept passing by, and his intrigue with this… _relationship,_ thing, that they had enacted all but increased, he held confidence that she was just figuring things out for herself and would turn up on her own power. Now, what that turning-up would entail for him, he wasn't so sure. He had conquered the realm of learning to read, and learning to write, and of learning to hunt and defend himself; but he hadn't conquered the realm of romance, and physical intimacy.

He _especially_ hadn't conquered it in terms of what others would deem _normal_ circumstances. He was way out of his league the moment it became a discussion of interspecies affairs.

Granted, he wasn't entirely ignorant of it. The following evening, as he was washing Vertigo down with the lavender scented oils she normally enjoyed on her more relaxed days, he tested his theories with her tolerance about _sensitive_ zones on her body. Unknowingly, did he present to her this newest tactic on the dawn of her own realization.

Tonight would change things yet _again._

_So do you see what I mean?_ The serpent rolled her wrist, smacking her chops and watching as he worked past her shoulder and behind her. _That is why I never understood the sensation of _complete mental stability. _Life cannot be truly accomplished and happy without the procuring of some kind of art. It could be painting, writing, drawing, singing or even speech-saying. But without art, life becomes gray. Art goes hand-in-hand with mania. No artist I've ever heard of has lived without some touch of madness. Thus, as a great artiste' of my trade and stature; how could I ever be sane and be happy with it?_

He waded up to his hips in the steaming bath water, smiling as she hummed and hissed her concerns to him, evolving herself into a rather talkative sort of lot. His hands- lathered in the lavender oils –swept slickly and quickly across her ribcage and her hip, causing her scaly hide to sheen, and wiggle slightly under its own weight.

_You don't even understand anything I tell you, and somehow… I find you and your obliviousness the most accepting out of any recipients I've ever told of my view of the world._

Vertigo craned her head around her flank, her long neck bending as it allowed her to dote on him with lidded eyes.

_No games this evening, man-thing?_ She purred.

He got the general gist of what she was saying. With a mischievous snicker, the man purposefully dove his hands into the joint between her hip, and the crevice of her upper thigh. He rubbed lightning fast and quickly, getting the oil in there and pulling out before it became too long for her own taste.

Vertigo's mouth opened, and she _laughed,_ squirming with delight and splashing the bathwater everywhere.

_I knew you were up to no good! _Vertigo squealed and hissed, she leaned her knees over and swept her tail around, butting it into his face with a playful bump. He chuckled at the motions and stumbled back through the water. _You know, it's awkward, little human,_ Vertigo calmed herself with a minty sigh, leaning her elbow on the rim of the tub, she arched her torso over and watched as he rubbed down her leg. _What I tolerate and what I don't. I imagine it bothers you, to some degree._

Her attentions were almost of the origin of a mental link to him. He detected her concerns acutely and offered her a shrug as he stepped back to his task.

Looking at her nonchalant eyes, and seeing the body language she held as he reapplied his palms to her flesh, he could practically hear her telling him of his astounding patience in this… _unique_ setting.

_It is your choice, mistress,_ he would've said, his fingers slicking into the water and wiggling her thigh as he lathered the clear perfume up and down. _I rather enjoy your company. If you want more than just a servant, I am… I am willing to do that at your discretion._

-But he did not possess the language to tell her that, and even if he had, she wouldn't have understood him. He could only speak a handful of words in Common and in some of the tribal dialects. That proclamation he had made to her at the river's bank had been the first time he had spoken any words around her, much less _to_ her in months. Words had never been a big linkage in their partnership. He knew Vertigo was- in effect –_talking_ to him when she looked at him with all these gestures and noises. He knew that she was probably relenting all kinds of secrets and casual miracles she had never told anyone else in her hundreds of years of life. He knew that he couldn't hear any of it, and this saddened him as much as it flattered him that she would tell him it.

Though, he wondered, as he got around to her other side and started scrubbing her other leg; if they _did_ share a language, would she still tell him these things if he could understand her?

Ironically, as he was thinking about this with an ounce of depression; Vertigo was craning around to her other flank so she could follow his progress, and her summary thoughts were:

_How I wish you could speak my tongue, man-thing. How I wish you possessed the throat, and the mouth to form my language, and hear me._ Vertigo shifted on her hands and knees in the water, sighing. _How I wish I could tell you about how much I… how much I crave you._

_Stop this!_

_No. I want him to know._

_He can't even understand you, much less accept your twisted confliction. Let the slave do his duty and then bid his leave._

_He is _not_ my slave._

_I thought you didn't _need_ him?_

_I don't!_

_Then why does he lavish over your thighs? And why do you let him like some steaming hen?_

_I do not _need _him, I _want_ him!_

He grunted at her and gestured to her legs.

Vertigo smacked her chops, and moved her hips over to see what he was pointing at. The water slapped around her silently as she saw him motioning with his hands. She understood after a second of examination, and obeyed with a tiny shrug.

She spread her thighs slightly and let him get to work on her inner flesh. He ducked under her tail with deft precision, dipping his hands once in the syrupy mixture of the lavender urn by the tub's side, and he swiveled his hands quickly on the flats of her legs.

There was no sound in the bathing chamber aside from the slick of the oil and the kicks of the water. Vertigo peered between her breasts until the blood started to gather in her head, and she watched him down there, her eyes lazing shut at the complacency and peace.

His snickering tugged her out of her daze. Evidently, as she was dosing; she had appeared mightily cute to his observations. She snorted at him and bumped him with her tail again. He fell into the water laughing, and splashing.

_What do you find so amusing?_ She rolled her ruby eyes, twisting around until she sat on the surface of the tub, and faced him with an inquisitive, inhuman stare. _Don't tell me you've gone crazy. That should have happened much longer ago by normal apes' standards…_

The man righted himself in the water, his bare form glistening from its touch. He smiled warmly and shook his head.

_It's nothing,_ this meant.

_It's something,_ she persisted, snorting from the steam wafting off the surface around them. _Do you find me entertaining? Do not tap my temper, man-thing, or I'll be forced to…_

Vertigo leaned forwards, and then splashed him in the face with a good slap into the water in front of him.

_Who is entertaining now?_

The situation devolved rather quickly. Her amused rumbles and hisses melded with his outraged cackles. Water sailed east, west, and arms butted and jerked into the waves to make them higher and bigger. They made such a mess, that at one point, there was just as much water soaking the chamber's floor around the tub's rims as there was remaining bathwater.

Vertigo reveled in the carelessness. She found that it was doubly better to have someone to _play with_ rather than to have serve as her underling. Times here had changed, and this time, the change had been rapid in comparison to all else.

It had taken years to make her empire, and build her madness temple in the neverthere. It had taken years again for that to fall.

Now, it had taken such a short amount of time for her human to go from servant, to… whatever this was.

What was he? A companion? A _friend? _

Vertigo's foot slipped on the floor of the tub in her rush to return a particularly large splash to her face. She jolted forwards, caught herself expertly before her weight could land on him, and found herself pinning him to the edge of the tub, the water still lapping around them from their efforts.

His laughter did not stop, but certainly decreased in volume. The normally stoic and obedient man was alight with rapture and glee. He gazed up at her with eyes that were especially bright, and a face uplifted by joy.

Vertigo watched him silently, fixing her knees' positions below the water's surface, and releasing her grip on the rim of the tub. Her claws migrated until they hovered under the water on either side of him, as if she was caught between trying to touch him and abstaining from it. It was like she meant to hide her obvious intentions in the waves.

The human flushed, and his smile quivered from an extreme dose of nervousness shooting through his veins. Eventually, he sifted upwards in the water, and he inched his face closer to her snout.

She let him touch her jaw, his hands positively wreaking of the lavender oil he had been washing her down with. They were warm, and _fleshy. _They were so _human._

The dinosoid nudged her nose closer inquisitively, actually eager to see what he was intending.

_…Yes~? _–She quietly egged him on, her eyes becoming heavier.

The human gathered up his daring and went through with it quickly, and without much sustaining need. The deified reptile blinked, her senses waking as he used his mouth to dizzying effect.

Her companion cupped her jaw, and his lips flexed over the tip of her snout, laying a brief, and warm kiss upon her scales.

_In return for the river,_ he would've said to her. He desperately hoped she would know as he leaned back and watched for her reaction. _After the saber cat, you… you kissed me on the forehead. Did I take it too far?_

Vertigo paused in the stillness of the bath's steam, and after an undying and arduous moment, she moved forward and returned the gesture over his mouth. It was a strange thing, using their mouths like this. Her long snake-snout wasn't designed for the contact, and she drooled on him a bit in an effort to open her chops slightly for his ease.

She tasted… _clean._ He had no other description for it. She tasted cleanly and had a slight tint of fruit, perhaps, from all the berries she snacked on throughout the day.

_You're daring,_ Vertigo sighed as she felt his hands slide down her neck and to her defined collar. _You aren't afraid to push the line with me, and I find strength in that._

Her tongue came into the scenario after another good minute of slapping cavities. Vertigo's eyes fluttered and completely shut and a primal hunger began to sweep through her veins.

She forgot all about the bath and the peace and quiet. Suddenly, it became a rush, and as with anything that she started; she needed more and more.

_More._

Vertigo forced her larger mouth into his own further, until he was craning back, and she was pressing him into the rim of the tub. Her claws gripped over his pinkish shoulders, and she twisted her head to the side for greater, mandible-flexing leverage.

_More._

The reptile parted their oral cavities with a wet, loud and detached gasp. Having been unable to breathe for that extensive period, he was panting as his master pressed her supple form into him, their foreheads creating a silent union.

_You remember the first time we tried something,_ she told him, her fingers stroking down his arms, her tail curling and twisting behind her. _I wanted you to watch._

He looked down at her breasts, hanging in the steam and water below him largely and with anticipatory comment. Vertigo followed his gaze, and took up his wrists in her claws.

_I don't want you to just watch this time,_ the snake opened her mouth, and her tongue flicked over his lips, the smell of lavender and the musk of the water invading both of their noses. She placed his hands on either side of her bosom, shifting his fingers into her supple, scaly mounds. _Squeeze. Hard._

He understood completely.

Her human tested the weight of the things in his hands by conjoining them in a dual-push. He pressed her organs together lightly at first, or in a measure of force that to _her_ could be perceived as light.

Vertigo nudged their foreheads tightly together as the familiar, euphoric rush slammed into her system.

_Yes…_

-Copious masturbation and tit-squeezing the last few nights hadn't been enough by far to kink out the emptiness she'd been experiencing since the saber attack days ago. She had spent so much time holding back because of this madness and this pride. She was too impatient now. Vertigo wanted to _taste _him, and she wanted him to taste _her._

_Harder._

By some measure of luck, he understood.

He had to use his whole forearms to get a secure lock on the orbs, but upon a completion of a fervent ring did the results become palpably unbearable.

With a grunt did he constrict his arms, and her green/blue breasts poked with rolls of fat over his elbows and into his chest. Vertigo produced a rumbling, hissing moan. Her thighs ground together in desperation in the water, splashing in turn with her whipping tail and her twitching cobra-frills.

_Harder. More. _

Vertigo scooped him out of the water, and placed him- dripping –on the rim of the tub. Already naked, she brought her face closely to his groin and examined the erect pylon sticking from just beneath his belly.

The creamy protrusion was riddled with wrinkly, taught skin, and possessed an engorged, pink-colored head that pulsed at her madly, almost like it was pointing in eagerness towards her.

_The reproductive organs of a beast._

This was no longer a derogatory sentence. Vertigo conjured it on the air of an excited giggle.

_Let me try something._

What happened next wasn't what she had in mind, in fact, it was accidental. Her tongue flicked out in an effort to taste the air- seeing as her serpentine nature was quite prevalent in her daily actions –but it instead dabbed on the underside of his penis. It was just a touch, and afterwards, she smacked her chops to consider the brief tinge that landed on her buds.

_Curious._

He didn't seem to think so. His thoughts were more closely aligned with her own.

He grunted, and his hips thrust off the stone beneath him.

_More, _he said by his motions. Vertigo thought about all the work he'd done for her. The hunting, the toe-picking, the teeth-cleaning, the refuse moving…

…How could she say no to a quirk? So he liked her mouth. Maybe the duel with the predator had solidified this deeper bonding, or, maybe it had been doomed to occur since the start.

Vertigo didn't know. She didn't care anymore either. She just wanted to relieve the sudden itch she was experiencing in her jaw and suck the man-thing's prick.

Her servant gawked as she puckered the tip of her snout, and allowed her tongue to circle in slow, agonizing warps about his organ's cap. She kissed over his second-head's opening, dousing his fire with steaming runs of serpent saliva.

_Vertigo~, has he inspired you to be more innovative?_

She snatched her eyes shut and dueled away the other presences, her mind kicking and punching, and exerting its conflict through a stronger pattern in her tongue.

_Begone, and give me this man-thing's voice._

Vertigo used two fingers to compress and spread the curious patch of hair matting the space around his extrusion's base. She came around with her other claw and carefully gripped around the rod's lower sections to steady it. Aligning the head with her snout, the snake made him shiver with her following tactic, one that could only be evidenced to outside observers by a greedy _slurp._

His resultant noise echoed across the bath chamber, battling with and conquering the slap of the water and the hiss of the steam. Prying fingers gripped at her cobra frills, and she almost laughed around him as she felt his little human arms pressing her downwards.

_You want me to eat it? _Vertigo flexed her jaw, dragging her tongue under and across the thick, cylindrical object caught in the tight cavern of her mouth. _Tell me that's what you want. Beg it of me._

The dinosoid couldn't stick it any further down her gullet even though she did most certainly try. His hair smelled bland, like the fur cloth he always wore, and the scent danced mightily in her nostrils alongside the strong tang of lavender and the salty touch of his flesh.

_Salt._

Vertigo's moan was stifled by her mouth being full. She narrowed her facial muscles in defined concentration; dragged back her head, and started to let his organ slide slowly out, where it emerged in likeness to a sluggish, slime-slicked road.

_He's even more tasty below the stomach,_ she mused, letting him slip back inside with a deft bob of her neck. The man's head keeled back, and for just a second of time as she felt his body spasm, she had been convinced that he had passed out. _He better not, or I'll eat him. _

_Technically, you already are._

_Not in _this_ way! In the… other way…_

Sheepishly made to pout from her own berating, Vertigo huffed around his penis and lathered her tongue in every direction and angle she could think of. She hooked its forked tip around the organ's flank and enwrapped it more and more out of its sheathe, until the midsection of his genital resembled a layered roll of licorice. She capped her chops and sucked loudly.

_He tastes tangy. I like it._

While the itch in Vertigo's jaw was pressing enough; the greater disturbance came from her _hips._

There was a fire that was burning down there, beyond the touch of the water and incurable by anything she could've done to herself. The serpent rumbled while she labored over him. She took a claw from his groin and clawed at one of her scaly breasts.

_When have I ever been one to _give_ before? _

-The answer to that question was obvious. She just didn't care enough to focus upon it. It was just a fleeting curiosity of how uncharacteristic she had truly become.

_I suppose only when I am set to receive greater…_

Vertigo pinched an eye open to look at him. What she saw made her body twitch in a realized jolt of excitement. His expression was modeled not after bliss anymore, but of a heightened sense of impending action. Her sucking had lapsed and he looked ready to jump off the rim of the tub.

Who was she to keep him, and, by extension, _herself,_ waiting?

_Fine,_ Vertigo twisted her tongue free of him, and with a wet, thick slap, she popped him out of her mouth, letting his organ bob and stand upright in the steamy air, slick with her saliva. _You have something in mind?_

He answered her by wiggling under her grip. She still couldn't entirely let him go, and that was due to her clinging desperation for touch. He had to worm through her arms, past her breasts, and away from her mouth as she followed him with her craning neck, licking and kissing his shoulder.

Eventually, he broke free of the fleshly prison. The water splashed and she painfully let him wade through the waves and towards her rear.

_So _this_ is what it feels like letting someone into your blind spot,_ she waited to see what would happen next curiously, hiking her hips higher, she rested her elbows on the rim of the tub and spread her feet on the bottom. Vertigo licked her chops, appreciating his slight aftertaste. _I actually think I want him in my mouth just a bit more._

Before she could attempt to follow through with that, she felt his hands on her backside, and her mind immediately switched gears.

_Is he rubbing more oil on me?_

Vertigo craned her head past her shoulder to see what he was doing, and in certain mimicry to the swiveling motions he used to appropriate her scented perfumes, she found that he was not scrubbing her rear, he was… _massaging it._

_I assume he enjoys what he sees,_ Vertigo rumbled, feeling her scaly cheeks wiggling under his fingers. _Let him adjust to his new toys._

-And new toys they were indeed. He had never actually imagined that lord Vertigo would let him ever do something like this. Of course, he'd fantasized about it in the past, particularly over the recent cycles when these feelings had started welling up in both of them. But to actually be behind the mighty reptile, and to actually have his hands on her… her _arse',_ it was quite a unique experience.

_Are you done gawking? _He saw her glance at him over her shoulder and her frill. Her red eyes were thin with impatience. _Do something._

He had an idea of what he wanted to do.

The man melded his palms to the base of her thick tail- which was thick enough that it was around the same mass as his torso was –he rubbed them along the tail's flanks, over the top, and he arched his elbows underneath to massage the bottom.

This close to the valley between her legs, and Vertigo started rocking her hips back into him. The serpent ground her rear-end and he was forced to steady himself on his heels as the sumptuous hills he was touching pressed into his belly and pelvis. Her great tail splashed the water and dripped noisily as it breached the tub's surface, and curled upwards, and upwards, until it towered over both of them.

Sluggishly, like a timbering tree, it took her tail a second to register its own weight, and it sagged forwards until the tip keeled over and draped past her shoulder. Fully exposed, with her fifth limb curling painfully above the center of his attention, he saw his dinosoid ruler pulsing with such extricated eagerness, that her flesh had turned a vibrant _pink._

In its stance of preparation, her entryway was albeit very different than it had looked to him in the past. It wasn't so discreet anymore, puffing, twitching, with thick globules of nectar dripping from its underside and into the bathwater.

_What is taking so long? _Vertigo growled under her breath. The snake's inquisitive head raised over the immeasurable mounds of her rear, and she blinked at him with this obvious plainness. _What male needs more incentive than what I've given you? That transcends species, I'm quite sure. Unless, of course, you're wondering how you could hope to give me such plea-SUREEE-~!_

Vertigo's breath was sucked out of her throat. He didn't wait for her to mentally scoff him a moment longer. He nudged his head into her, and _kissed_ her, but not in a normal sense.

To gain entry, of course, he needed to work his way inside slowly and with care. He gave her mound an experimental peck, just at the top, and this was what made the reptile jolt, like the tub had been struck by lightning.

_More of that,_ she was panting, her snake-tongue lazing out the side of her mouth like she was a beast in heat. _More of that this instant!_

He was all too happy to oblige.

Her human dragged his tongue from the bottom to the top, testing the railway between the two separate gates, and tasting the trace amounts of nectar that had gathered there.

Her mouth tasted _clean_ to him. Her cauldron tasted… _spicy._ It certainly had a tang to it that wouldn't go under appreciated by an admirer of such cuisine. Of course, his palette was in the realm of something much different than flavors in a culinary sense. He still feasted on her like the situation was more the latter.

He cupped his lips over hers, and punched into her hole with his tongue, slurping, until the meat of her passage rippled from the passing air.

Vertigo _wailed_ at this. The sound was indescribable. He could never hope to word for someone accurately how a _snake_ screamed, but it happened right in front of him, and there was no denying that.

_More,_ Vertigo breathed, she clawed her breasts together and sat back into his smaller face. _More._

Her servant sucked loudly in an effort to keep up with her bubbling, rising demand. He cored her out with untrained, but loose and heavy laps into her passage. The rippling, silken walls inside her were like instruments to be played, and his tongue the tool of trade. Poking them, dragging the sharper edges of his organ along them equaled stifling results for her.

Vertigo cried and the bathwater splashed as she sank the furthest she could go onto her knees. The snake pleaded to him with silent eyes, struggling to see what he was doing past her backside's wide girth.

_Faster, _she thought, sitting back, and jamming as much of his face as she could into her groin. _Look at me, look at me,_

She slapped the water a few times, and the blissful parting of her slit ended for a brief moment. He gripped her cheek and gazed at her wildly, wondering why in the unholy hell she had made him stop.

Vertigo rolled her wrist rapidly at him.

_Faster._

He spat into the water and reinserted himself, his crazed expression vanishing. A second later, and Vertigo was made to wail at the wall of the chamber ahead of her. He kissed her again, even going so far as to open his mouth and use _teeth._ She was afraid he'd unhinge his mandible at this rate. Vertigo couldn't bring herself to voice those concerns. She rocked her hips into his neck, sighing loudly and drooling from her limp tongue.

_Faster._

Vertigo grit her fangs and shoved her forehead into the rim of the tub. Desperately, she clawed the stone and gyrated her pelvis.

_Cataclysm-! FASTER, damn you! Faste-_

Vertigo's eyes snapped open, most likely bloodshot with shock and appall.

_Why have you stopped?!_

She was about to whirl around and snarl at him when contact was reaffirmed with her dripping, gaping vent. Something was curious about what he was doing, in that whatever he was sticking into her gates did not feel like his tongue, and it certainly didn't feel like his fingers.

Vertigo's crimson eyes dilated, and her mouth hung widely as she realized what was happening.

_He's mating me._

The snake sighed shrilly, and she could hear him groan as he struggled to find proper footing to line himself up with her hips. It took a few slippery, poking tries, but eventually, more than just the head was idling inside her very personal lobby.

He steadied her with a palm on her rear, and another flattening the presented underside of her tail. Breaching the walls before him was all a game of endurance, and needless to say, all those hunting trips, and those lifting jobs were not a proper source of experience for something so specific as this.

Both of them were in that field minutely. It wasn't simply the lack of knowledge on affairs as this, but the lack of past action. His spear running rampantly through her defenses was actually uncomfortable at first. It was jarring and unfamiliar.

Vertigo was caught between sighing in pleasure and huffing at the necessity of her body's ministrations.

_Ah! Slower!_ Vertigo hissed at him to calm down back there. Reluctantly, and with a pained grimace did he do his best to obey. As it pleased her, he always thought. Such maintenance couldn't change now.

He found a slow pattern, at least, his eyes bugging at the innate fascination of watching the alien vaginal organ suckle him. It was so surreal, seeing the snake's hole spread like it was, with trailing flaps of pink that dragged outwards from the canal with his pulls and pushes. It was like the organ was trying to pull him in and never let him out. The walloping, warm and silky firmness that he was shoving into was quite the motivator to want something just like that. Still, undeterred, he held onto her hips, steadied himself, and tried something different.

**_Clap~! _**–went her rolling backside. He had stabbed into her with perhaps too much force. Though Vertigo seemed pleased with his adventurousness. Before her mounds of flesh could even stop rippling, the serpent dinosoid had her head back, and she was moaning at the ceiling. Her expression spoke of exhaustion, her mouth slightly parted, her eyes drunken. He decided he enjoyed her looking like that, and worked towards making it more pronounced.

He dragged back his hips and hit into her again.

**_Clap~! _**–skin to scales. He leant down and sucked his mouth over as much flesh as he could manage on her bulbous tail's underside. Hungrily, her mound squelched as he worked in and out of it with a meticulous and slow repeat of actions. Vertigo rumbled, hissed and produced a sharp cry. Her trench spread, settled, spread again and receded. It was like playing with wet clay.

_So this is sex,_ Vertigo sighed, her breath visible as a translucent, white plume past her tongue. _How recreational._

The serpent grit her fangs and rocked back into him a few times, crashing her heavy thighs into his pelvis with rippling, smacking reports.

The inhumanity in the exchange was evident by the sheer amount of weight being thrown around. Her proportions were far beyond what a human woman would have possessed, and so the sex was doubly exhilarating as it was exhausting. It was difficult standing upright, thrusting, and maintaining cohesion with so much lizard-arse' flapping into him.

_Faster,_ Vertigo rolled her wrist, glancing at him. _I'm ready for it, just do something else. Mix it up, this is getting tedious._

_My legs hurt,_ he worried over himself, steadying onto her hips. _Maybe if I try…_

He hiked his chest into her tail, hugged her hips, and used the momentum of his own waist to bring himself down and into her with a fresh impalement.

_There's something,_ he smiled with triumph.

_Yes! _–Vertigo gasped. She knew what he was getting at! That would be amazing!

Helping him, the serpent lifted herself on her knees, held onto the rim of the tub and placed her chin over her claws. She reared back her thighs, and he set to work pulling himself out, and letting himself fall back in.

This_ is mating! _Vertigo rammed her breasts into the bricks, crying out over her knuckles as his skin slapped wetly into her scales. _This is what I've been craving!_

Her stomach was rippling with the euphoria, and her thighs' torturous tickling had never felt so scratched. In, out, in, out. Vertigo, Goddess of Snakes and Insanity hiked her rear-end up in the air, and moaned fervently as she let the human rut her like a hyperactive stud to a bitch.

His feet- lifted from the water and born onto her stronger, larger weight –dripped and sent trails everywhere amid his motions. He jammed himself into the dinosoid's canal repeatedly, forgetting all about the exertion burning his hips.

_Is there risk in him finishing like this? _Vertigo's disgusted personalities bickered despite the racket of fornication.

_Who cares?!_

Vertigo was locked in a heavenly trance from this. She hissed once, twice, and then the third time devolved into a long and drawn out cry. She could feel her man-thing twitching and convulsing inside her. She was about to be claimed by an ape, she was about to go through with something she'd sworn on the verge of enragement she'd never be caught _dead_ doing.

She was about to that little rodent man fill her up.

But this romp was so good, that Vertigo didn't have the air or the mind to remember her own past standards. All she could hear were her cries, his groans and the smacking of his delectable skin into her scaly arse' cheeks.

The end happened with a series of fluent, but soft punches. She heard him make this barking sigh, and soon the sensation of hot bands of magma hitting her canal's end and running downwards came into her mind.

His organ pulsed and disgorged thick wads of his solution that slipped and gathered at the gates of her cervix. He weakly pushed into her again, and again as his head throbbed and the streaks of globules became thicker.

Vertigo for own part drowned it all in an uprising flood of vaginal secretions. Their individual contributions mixed and bubbled out of her trench, personified by several leaking rivers that fled down her vent, his testes and even down her belly to drip into the water beneath them.

The Vertigo of years past- the _uncorrupted Vertigo –_would've shed tears of horror for what had just occurred here. But the newer Vertigo, the one who had been consumed with a fetish for her man-thing servant couldn't have been more pleased with herself.

In fact, the serpent was smug as she rode down the messy waves of her interspecies romp, she was smiling, and hissing with auspicious content.

Above, laying on her like she was an island in the middle of a steaming ocean, her human looked like he was going to pass out. His eyes were weak, and his mouth was slack. His normally pinkish skin was crimson, and the air was permeated thickly now with the scent of lavender and the acrid smells of bodily fluids.

_Perhaps my powers can't drive him mad, but maybe I can drive him mad with my hips…_

Vertigo giggled as she played with him. She constricted her muscles and bunched her rear, mimicking a sleeve of flesh squeezing a limp sausage of meat.

_Take that, beast._

She heard him groan at the torture born from her giddy cruelty. The dinosoid wiggled her hips and squished his fading member into her folds with delight.

_….So… because I value your opinion,_ Vertigo sighed, offering him a raised brow over her flank. _Tell me; what was it like fucking a goddess?_

She figured she knew what his answer to that would've been, judging by the stupid, pleased grin he flashed her from up there on her back.

_Always so confident,_ she sighed happily. _Now, that that is over with…_

Vertigo righted herself on the drop of a dime. Raggedly, her exhausted servant was tossed off her back, and vanished into the bathwater with a spectacular splash.

_You got your man-fluids all over my legs _and_ my hips,_ Vertigo stretched herself with a few popping joints. She ran two fingers between her legs, and wiggled them together before her face, examining the silvery mucus she had retrieved. _I need a bath more now than I did when I first came in here. _

His black-haired head breached the water's surface, and he spat a fine stream from his lips with a content smile.

_Bathe me again,_ she waved her claw dismissively, though with difference from times past. Normally her face was plastered with disinterest. He had never seen her request something of him with a warm smile. _Bathe me again _please.

_Yes, mistress,_ he stood in the steaming, wavering water, and waded closer to her. _If it pleases you, mistress._

It pleased her very much, and she doubted that she could contain this new discovery within herself without a rabid delve back into it some time soon.

She settled on her knees before him and bumped his forehead with her nose, bidding him to listen to her query before he started again.

_Do you know something, man-thing?_

He smiled and kissed her between her ruby eyes, hugging her shoulders, tiredly laughing at her.

_I have been wondering what intrigued me the most about you; was it your body, or the way you think? Flesh or mind?_

Vertigo licked him across his lips, a pleased rumbling thrumming behind her breasts.

_I find you are still delectable in both ways._

The little human man smiled at her with his little mouth, and hugged her with his little arms. The steam simmered in the room and shrouded their visage from an uncaring Urth.

Night fell on the Gallows where their dawn breached.

* * *

**-0-0-0-0-0-**

**-0-**

**Fin**


End file.
